Jack Thorne squirms slightly whenever someone describes him as ‘prolific’. “I always feel it talks to a lack of care,” says the man The Guardian once dubbed ‘the hardest-working writer in Britain’. “I don’t want to be the guy who, when someone asks for six bananas, says ‘I can give you 12 bananas.’ So that’s why I’m a bit frightened of the word. While also recognising there might be some truth in it.”
He’s certainly a man who likes to keep busy. In the past few months alone, the multi-award-winning stage and screenwriter has premiered two major new works in London – The Motive and the Cue, named Best Play at last month’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards, and When Winston Went to War with the Wireless – and helped storyline a third, Stranger Things: The First Shadow. For television, meanwhile, he wrote Best Interests, starring Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen as a couple fighting for their disabled daughter’s medical care, and is currently working on new Netflix drama Toxic Town, alongside the first ever TV adaptation of Lord of the Flies, for BBC One.
P word aside, would he admit to being a workaholic? “Totally,” he says. “That’s changed a bit, because I’ve got a kid and a family. But I can still happily do 14-hour days when they’re not around. I enjoy it. I love my job.”
In addition to the new projects, a couple of old favourites will also be drawing in the West End crowds this festive season. At the Palace Theatre, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – the critically lauded stage phenomenon he co-wrote with JK Rowling – continues to pack them in after seven years of sell-out performances. At The Old Vic, meanwhile, his magical adaptation of A Christmas Carol is also back for a seventh year. So is it too early to start saying it wouldn’t be Christmas without Jack Thorne’s A Christmas Carol?
“I think it’s way too early,” he smiles – modestly crediting the “dream team” of director Matthew Warchus, composer Christopher Nightingale and designer Rob Howell as the real geniuses behind a show that boasts everything from dancing and carolling to parachuting sprouts.
“There’s a scene, in the winter snow, that starts with a soprano right up in the gods of the theatre, singing out. And then someone else joins in down in the stalls, and someone else joins in over there… All these people, arranged throughout one of the most beautiful theatres in the world… until suddenly the whole theatre is singing. And it just gives me goosebumps every time.”
This year sees former Time Lord Christopher Eccleston stepping into the role of literature’s most famous miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. “I was jumping off the walls when I heard Chris was interested,” beams Thorne. “I’ve been such a fan of his for so long. And he’s made for this role. I knew he wouldn’t struggle with the dour stuff, but he’s also capable of this incredible joy. One of my favourite episodes of TV ever is [2005 Doctor Who story] The Doctor Dances, where he’s literally dancing with glee across the screen.”
Is it a challenge to bring something new to one of the world’s best-known fables? “One of the questions you need to ask yourself when you’re doing an adaptation is: ‘how loyal do I need to be?’” he reflects. “So, for instance, when I wrote [Philip Pullman’s] His Dark Materials for television, all of us felt that, having been given the chance to tell this story on TV, it was our job to tell the story as loyally as possible. But Charles Dickens isn’t short of adaptations of A Christmas Carol. So I feel no loyalty to him whatsoever.” (Hence the parachuting sprouts.)
Nearly 200 years on, A Christmas Carol’s depiction of poverty and a struggling underclass remains depressingly relevant, and each performance concludes with a collection for London’s most needy (this year, it’s food charity City Harvest). “When I was a kid, food banks didn’t exist,” says Thorne, who grew up in Bristol and then Newbury in Berkshire. “And now it’s just sort of an established part of life. My son’s school had a warm bank last Christmas. The idea that we need a place where people can go to keep warm… All that we’ve done, in the name of austerity, the lie of austerity, it’s absurd and it’s distressing and, yes, it’s Victorian.”
Like Christopher Eccleston, Thorne – one of four children born to a care worker mother and town planner father – has never been shy about nailing his political colours to the mast, especially when it comes to championing the working classes. “I mean, Chris is a much better advocate than I am,” he says. “But I grew up in a house where my dad was chair of his union. I went to conference with him as a kid, we went to picket lines, we went on marches. I grew up in that sort of world. My mum went to jail for the CND.
“So there was always politics in our lives. And my mum and dad don’t worry about saying when they’re disappointed by my work, if they’re not sure what it’s saying, politically. I’ve always got them on my shoulder, like a pair of Jiminy Crickets, making me think about what my words are saying about the world.”
Much of Thorne’s work is shot through with a burning sense of injustice that would confidently pass the Jiminy Cricket test. Miniseries such as National Treasure, Kiri and The Accident tackled hot-button issues of race, class, sexual power and corporate negligence, while his devastating 2021 TV film Help, starring Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham, poured cold fury on the way in which Covid was allowed to rip through Britain’s care homes.
All of these have helped contribute to a haul of more than 30 major awards that includes five Baftas, an Olivier, a Tony, an International Emmy and four Royal Television Society Awards (including Outstanding Contribution to British Television). But it’s just one side of a writer who’s equally at home weaving epic fantasies about boy wizards, talking polar bears and monsters in the backwoods of Indiana.
Do they all serve the same purpose, I wonder? Or does he swap genres to satisfy a different itch? “I think they’re the same thing,” he considers. “I think fantasy is social realism and social realism is fantasy. It’s a way of asking questions about the world. That’s what Dickens was doing with A Christmas Carol – he was writing fantasy in order to see inside a social problem. So I think they all speak to each other.”
It’s an interest that stems in large part from his lifelong love of E.T. “It’s a total obsession,” he admits: he and his wife, comedy agent Rachel Mason, walked down the aisle to the theme tune, and it’s no coincidence their seven-year-old son is called Elliott.
Fortunately, Elliott seems to have inherited his love of the fantastical. “He’s currently going through a big Harry Potter phase,” says Thorne. “We’re working our way through the books, and when he gets to the end, I’m going to take him to see the play. I can’t tell you how excited I am about that.”
A few years ago, when JK Rowling’s views on trans right first started to make waves, Thorne wrote his Cursed Child co-author a private letter. “I wrote because I have someone close to me who is trans,” he told The Times, “and I worry about the kid who has loved those books and is hearing that they don’t fit.”
Is this something we should all be doing, I ask: finding ways to engage in conversation, without it escalating into a shouting match? “I certainly think the way we debate things now is problematic,” he says. “I don’t know whether it’s all down to Twitter, or whether something else is going on, but it seems to have knocked out that part of us that wants to discuss things, and that’s done a lot of damage.”
Did Jo ever write back? “You know what? I’m not going to get into that,” he says, equably. “I think that discussion is just too complicated.”
‘I’m still processing what my autism diagnosis means. But looking back on my childhood, it makes some of that hurt a lot easier to understand’
As a self-confessed “socially awkward introvert”, how does Thorne cope with moving in gilded celebrity circles, with the likes of Millie Bobby Brown (star of his Enola Holmes films) on speed-dial? “Well, I don’t have Millie on speed-dial,” he laughs. “Though she’s very nice.”
He recalls how, during rehearsals for The Motive and the Cue – which explores the true story of when John Gielgud (Mark Gatiss) directed Richard Burton (Johnny Flynn) in a Broadway production of Hamlet – director Sam Mendes would occasionally put him on the spot about something in front of the cast and crew, at which point he’d flail around hopelessly. “I’m not someone who talks much,” he says. “After I took my wife to see my family for the first time, she said two things. One was, ‘I’m never playing Monopoly with those people again’. And the other was that I didn’t say anything all weekend. Apparently I just sat there in silence, without even realising I was doing it.”
Rachel’s brother-in-law is Frank Skinner: surely one of Britain’s liveliest wits brings you out of your shell? “Frank was here last night, actually,” says Thorne, who lives on the same north London street as both Skinner and his longtime pal David Baddiel. “I have a lot of conversations with Frank, but Frank is also happy to just talk. He once said to me, ‘if I’m in a conversation with people I find boring, then anything they say I basically see as heckling’. So I hope he finds me interesting. But at the same time, I’m quite happy to just sit and listen to him, and enjoy the show.”
In January, Thorne revealed that, at the age of 44, he’d been diagnosed with autism – a revelation he owes to a recent appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “It was like when doctors spot a mole on your arm while you’re on This Morning or something,” he laughs. “Someone heard me talking and wrote to me via my theatre agent, Rachel, saying, ‘I think you should seek out [a diagnosis]’. I said to Rachel, who I’ve known for 20 years, ‘do you think there’s anything to it?’ and she said, ‘yeah’. Then I went downstairs and asked my wife and she went, ‘definitely’. And then gradually everyone went, ‘yeah, we all thought you were autistic’. When I got the diagnosis, Sam [Mendes]’s response was, ‘I could have saved you the money’. So it seemed to be an open secret for everyone apart from me.
“I’m still processing what it means,” he adds. “But looking back on my childhood, it just makes it a lot easier to understand, and some of that hurt a lot easier to understand.”
His early adulthood was particularly difficult: while a student at Cambridge, Thorne developed cholinergic urtricaria, a condition that induced chronic pain and made him allergic to heat – including his own body heat. Forced to drop out (he later returned to complete his degree), he spent much of his 20s in bed.
It took him a few years, he says, to embrace the word ‘disabled’, in relation to himself. But it’s a theme he regularly returns to in his work – in dramas like Cast Offs, Crip Tales and his 2022 film When Barbara Met Alan – and he is a founder of the pressure group Underlying Health Conditions, which aims to change disability representation and practises in the television industry. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever been part of, really,” he says. “The response from TV bosses, who’ve gone ‘okay, how can we help?’ has been brilliant.”
It’s difficult to say how much his illness has shaped him as a writer, and as a person, he says. But if he had his time again, he probably wouldn’t change much. ”My dad has this phrase that every year’s been the best year of his life. And he’s had some pretty bad years in that time. But he says he wouldn’t be where he was without those years.
“And I sort of subscribe to that belief. Would I rather have had a year where I wasn’t in pain, or 10 years when I wasn’t in quite a lot of pain? Yes. But at the same time, if I hadn’t lived on my own in Luton and walled myself into a house for a decade, I might not have learned how to do this. It’s that thing of: if a ladybird hadn’t landed on my thumb, would my life have changed forever? You don’t know, do you?”
This interview was first published in Waitrose Weekend on 7 December, 2023
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