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“I’D STARTED PLANNING to do a garden-design course,” says Simon Woods with a shy smile. “I’ve always liked nature, and I thought, Well, writing is never going to happen. I’ll never be able to finish anything that’s any good. So I started googling garden--design courses. They follow me around the internet to this day.”
Woods is sitting in a tiny room at the top of the National Theatre in London, where his first play is about to be staged. It is a clear spring day, five months before opening night, and he has just seen the model of the set. He did, in the end, write something very good indeed, a touching and original piece called Hansard, about a 1980s Tory politician and his left-leaning wife—a play where people and politics collide, and truths are revealed.
“I’d always written for myself,” the 39-year-old says. “I’d written 500 pages of a really complicated historical novel. Then I just started writing about these two characters in the middle of nowhere. They were trapped in a hell of their own making, and I sort of engineered it backward to work out what mistake they had made.” Still, the former actor didn’t show anyone what he had written—except his husband, the longtime Burberry chief creative officer Christopher Bailey. “I’d been very squirrelly about it,” he adds with a laugh. But Woods eventually sent it to an agent, and the agent sent it to the National, and here we are.
“I knew a few pages in that it was something special,” says Rufus Norris, the director of the National. “It’s rare to encounter writing of such ease, wit, and such emotional and theatrical intelligence. To find it coming from an unproduced playwright is even rarer.” Norris decided to workshop the play with the actors Lindsay Duncan and Alex Jennings, both of whom are old friends of Woods’s from his acting days. When they join us, it is like witnessing a family reunion. “There’s no point in hiding it; we basically live together,” jokes Duncan with a warmly protective air. “To be doing Simon’s first play means a huge amount to both of us. We just want everything for him.” Jennings nods his agreement. “I was dazzled by the dialogue as soon as I read it,” he adds.
Set in 1988, in Oxfordshire, Hansard follows the Conservative MP Robin Hesketh, who is spending the weekend with his discontented wife, Diana. She is fighting him over his support for the infamous Section 28 clause in the Local Government Act, in which the government of Margaret Thatcher attempted to ban teaching about the acceptability of homosexuality. The debate is remembered today as one of those moments when English society was asked to define itself, and when politicians imposed a certain view of the values people should live by.
Even in the briefest of meetings, you can see why Woods inspires such warm loyalty from the people involved in this project. He is a gentle and charming figure, with an endearing smile and a tendency to let his sentences drift away as he tries to pin down the circumstances that led him to this point. He grew up in the same region that his play takes place, in what he describes as “a very warm, loving, supportive, encouraging, nurturing family.” His father, now an organic vegetable farmer, was a lawyer; his mother is a garden historian; and young Woods followed a safe route to adulthood, going first to Eton and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read English literature and, for a time, dated the actress Rosamund Pike. He became an actor almost by accident. “It was what I was doing with my life, without really having yearned to do it,” he says. He was successful, with parts in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (opposite Pike) and plentiful work on TV, but slowly a certain disillusion set in. “I remember trying to persuade a writer for one show that I needed a scene that involved me unburdening myself. Nobody was interested. I remember thinking then, I wish I was in the writers’ room. On film sets, I’d sit behind the camera between scenes and ask questions of everyone.”
In 2008, he decided to stop acting. He had become friends with Chelsea Clinton while at Oxford, and, he explains, “having got to know her mother, I felt there was this huge gulf between the public persona and the warm, empathetic, funny, thoughtful person behind it.” So he decided to volunteer for Clinton during the primaries. “I wasn’t insensible to the ridiculousness of being an obscure English actor knocking on doors in Iowa, South Carolina, and Texas,” he says. He found the experience revelatory—“It taught me a huge amount about America, about the political process, and about the battering you take when you put your head above the parapet”—and he wrote about it for the Huffington Post. “That gave me a feeling of satisfaction and ownership over my work that I’d not found before.”
Around the same time, he had met Bailey—set up by mutual friends over a “long, wonderful, slightly drunken dinner”—and they were married in 2012. (When we meet, Woods is dressed, fittingly, head to toe in denim Burberry, with a linen shirt, jeans, and battered brown shoes. “Oh, my shoes,” he cries, looking at them ruefully. “They’re sort of terrible.”) Their developing relationship has also played its part in Woods’s decision-making; with the arrival of their daughters—Iris, who is five, and Nell, who is three—Woods found that everything changed. “I think the play came out of those feelings of being a parent, the frightening responsibility you have—wanting so much for your children to thrive and prosper and be happy.” In terms of his working life, being busy as a father has made him more disciplined. “It makes me snatch my time better. When I started to write the play, we had a two-year-old and a newborn, so it was all about finding pockets of time.”
The couple live mainly in a leafy part of North London, where Iris is about to start school. They also spend as much time as they can in Umbria, where six years ago they bought “an old tumbledown farmhouse with no roof and a fig tree growing out of it.” Until very recently, Woods has shouldered the being-at-home side of parenthood, while Bailey continued his responsibilities at Burberry. But last December, Bailey left the job that had consumed him for 17 years. “It has been such a joyful thing for him to be able to work out what he wants to do with the rest of his life and to spend time with the children,” Woods says, smiling. That change has also allowed Woods to pursue more writing work; another play for the National, a film for the BBC, and a TV series are in the offing. “It’s not like we were taking turns,” he says. “I don’t want to make it sound as if I was chained to the kitchen sink.”
In the past, Bailey has suggested that Woods is the clever one in their partnership—something Woods shrugs off very quickly. “That’s just Christopher being falsely modest. He is the most brilliant person I have ever met,” he says. “He found something at Burberry that he was really passionate about and did it unbelievably well, and that has been an inspiration to me.”
The playwright was only eight years old when the battle over Section 28 was fought but still feels that it is pressing, “recent political history,” he explains. The country is in the midst of a moment when “a certain type of patrician Englishman is allowed to be in charge,” he says, and the play does seem acutely perceptive about a type of charm that often rises to the top of British society. (Although it was written well before the post–Theresa May battle for the leadership of the Tory Party, in the ascent of the pro-Brexit Boris Johnson—another conservative Oxonian who espouses a narrow concept of who belongs and who does not—there are echoes of contemporary politics.)
“What we have seen,” Woods says, “with President Trump in the U.S., with Brexit in the U.K., is that it’s quite easy for the clock to be turned back. An irresponsible political class can do quite a lot of damage when people aren’t looking.” It is a lot to tackle in a domestic drama, and Woods is already conscious both of the honor of having his first play produced by the National Theatre—and of the risks. “It’s very exposing,” he says, “and of course I worry about that. But you’ve got to try.”