Colin Firth in Julian Mitchell's 'Another Country'.

His varied career as a stage and screen writer has seen him launch Colin Firth’s career and even write a teleplay with The Kinks’s Ray Davies. Now, Julian Mitchell is returning to novel writing, as Jenny Williams found out

Julian Mitchell wasn’t always a playwright. In fact, he started as a poet and almost became a spy. “I was terribly pleased. I’d been in America for two years and I came back and didn’t know what to do,” says Mitchell, “I got a letter from the Foreign Office so I went along and met a man. It dawned on me he was asking me to be a minor collector of information. I said ‘Oh, you want me to be a spy!’”

Fortunately, Mitchell wasn’t tempted into a career with MI6 but continued to write numerous plays and dramas for stage and screen, launching many famous actors’ careers as well as his own. After great critical acclaim and success for his work, including the many episodes of Inspector Morse he wrote, Mitchell is returning to novel writing.

The 74-year-old writer has finished two of a series of novels set in the 1970s and 1980s about Monmouthshire, where he currently lives with his long-term partner. More so, he’s hoping to write a film about Lord Lucan and has been approached to adapt Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Solider for the stage.

Mitchell’s return to novel writing following the six novels he wrote in the 1960s has been met with limited success. “I’m suffering from what’s known as the ‘saga syndrome’”, he laughs, “which is, if you’re over a certain age, when no-one wants to publish you unless you’ve been published already. Nobody knows I was once published and used to be a novelist.”

People do know, however, about Mitchell’s stage and screen writing. One of Mitchell’s most renowned plays, Another Country, set in a public school exploring themes of homosexuality and Marxism won the Laurence Olivier award for the best new play in 1982. The also play marked Rupert Everett and Daniel Day-Lewis’s first West End appearances and Colin Firth was still at drama school when he replaced Day-Lewis for a role in Mitchell’s play. Another Country was then turned into a film adaptation in 1984.

Among other names Mitchell has worked alongside, Oscar-winning Danny Boyle directed one of Mitchell’s screenplay’s ‘Cherubim and Seraphim’ for Inspector Morse in 1992. The play was based on The Magic Flute by Mozart. “Danny had never been to the opera so we all went to the opera and he was very dubious about it,” says Mitchell of the research they conducted together for the episode.

In Mitchell’s other work, research was more readily available. Born in 1935 in Essex, Mitchell growing up gay in the 1940s and 1950s when the word ‘gay’ didn’t exist and many people, like his father, believed “gay people deserved to be shot” was a trying time. This and the Wolfenden Report of 1957, which legalised homosexual relations between consenting adults, formed the basis of his BBC drama, Consenting Adults in 2007.

Despite his screenwriting success, Mitchell prefers the theatre. “The audience makes the theatre. It may seem to be the same performance every night but it’s not. The actors are always responding back off the auditorium; whereas in the film or television it’s always edited and completed and done.”

Some actors, such as Colin Firth and Rupert Everett, have successfully moved from Mitchell’s stage to the screen. But Mitchell is dubious about the present ability of actors to move from screen to stage. “You’ve got to be heard. One of the great complaints from people who go the theatre now is that actors are not trained for that. They’re trained for television and film. They whisper,” he says in his clear diction.

“The greatest film actors are the ones who hardly move their faces,” he continues, “You ought to be able to, just with a flick of the eyebrow, just to convey a huge emotion. Not everyone can make that jump.”

As Mitchell knows. He has made several jumps between platforms but not always with success. Indeed, some of his works have never made it out of his attic. Arthur, a teleplay written with The Kinks’s Ray Davies about a carpet layer is one of these. “The producer tried to “busk it”, as they say in the trade and he failed it,” he explains, “I’ve never forgiven that man,” he adds frankly.

The apparent break he took between Inspector Morse and Consenting Adults was due to several films he was working on not being made. “One film in every hundred gets made,” he says,

“When they do make your film, they muck it up because it’s a commercial business.”

And commercial business is not something Mitchell finds appealing. “Do you watch Britain’s Got Talent?” he asks, “That fat father and son, weren’t they ludicrous? I thought it demonstrated without question that Britain has not got talent.”

However, despite Mitchell’s ‘saga syndrome’, it’s clear that Britain has got Mitchell’s talent for as long as keeps on writing.