To celebrate the release of his new book, The Coming Storm, I caught up with Greg Mosse to discuss his passion for theatre and literature.

You’ve had a very interesting and varied career so far. Can you please share a summary of your work in the industry / the highlights from your career to date?

My professional life is like a novel divided into a sequence of dramatic parts. At university in London and for a couple of years after. I acted and wrote and produced in the London Fringe. Looking back, it was a golden time with excellent reviews in City Limits and Time Out. Among larger plays, I performed two different one-man shows and learned to trust my own words. Later, I moved on a whim to Paris and became a translator and interpreter. Nothing in my life has brought me the same horizon-widening intellectual joy as learning to converse and – above all – read in French and Spanish.

Living in Los Angeles and New York, working in the building trade, I enjoyed a new form of ‘making’, not so different from theatre or writing: foundations, overall structure, detail, finish. One evening, having completed work on a swish Manhattan restaurant, my colleague and I sat in our paint-and-plaster-stained clothes at the table next to a mid-eighties Mick Jagger, eating and drinking to excess.

When my wife, Kate Mosse, decided to leave publishing for the precarity of being a writer – and she and I decided to have children – I trained as a teacher and worked in a variety of deprived London secondary schools, discovering that working behalf of others, even when things go badly, is always important and worthwhile.

When Kate’s novel Labyrinth became stratospheric, I helped create her 3D animated website and developed a program of creative writing teaching around her inspiration and research. Out of that grew an unexpected academic career, including devising and running my own Masters in Creative Writing, validated by the University of Sussex.

As time passed and our children grew up, I had the freedom to return to theatre, my first love, writing and producing twenty-five plays and musicals. Simultaneously, I founded my West-End script development program. Criterion New Writing, providing free, on-stage workshops, devising brand new plays with teams of mid-career playwrights. Then coronavirus made theatre illegal, for a time, and I sat quietly in my chair and wrote novels instead. I am very lucky that they are novels strangers want to read.

Going to the theatre is a magical experience, especially taking a child for the first time. What does theatre mean to you?

Theatre exists fleetingly, just once, with a particular set of audience members and a unique performance. Then, the next night, it happens again, and it’s the same but different. That’s the magic of live performance, created anew at each ‘lights up’.

You’ve an impressive backlist of scripts. Please can you tell me a little bit about the Criterion New Writing Programme?

The idea behind Criterion New Writing is simple. Financed by the generosity of the Criterion Theatre Trust, it aims to give talented mid-career playwrights the opportunity to spend an extended period on-stage in the West End, so that their imaginations naturally begin to fill those majestic larger spaces. Every autumn, we run showcases to share fragments of the brand-new work.

Script writing and novel writing are very different. Please tell us a bit about your process.

Each dramatic sequence in a novel or a play should be a like a short story, worth reading on its own, but more intriguing and compelling when placed alongside other scenes or chapters. Novels and plays are different in technical ways, to do with their different media, but also in terms of scale, a novel being five times the
length of a two-act play. Whether I’m writing songs for a musical, journalism or prose from one of my novels, I do 90% of my work between six-thirty and ten-thirty in the morning, fuelled by coffee and solitude. This works for me; every writer has to find the pathway that leads them to finishing. Nothing else matters.

I’m sure with all the travelling you do you meet a lot of interesting people from all walks of life. Do you have a favourite character that you’ve written?

Alexandre Lamarque, the hero of The Coming Storm, is a flawed genius, perceptive, loyal, determined. The forces ranged against him are vast, but he doesn’t flinch. Not everyone, however, can be saved – from disaster or from themselves. He finds himself confronted with impossible choices. I would love to meet Alex and reassure him: ‘You did your best.’

Which of your plays / musicals do you most want to revive?

My composer-partner and I have been working on a new musical for a local youth theatre that has existed for thirty-five years with no public funding, just the energy and drive of the children and the volunteers. I would love to see this new work performed – much more than I would want to see a revival.

You live in Carcassonne, which is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited. How important do you think setting is when grounding a play or a novel?

Kate found inspiration in the stones of the Carcassonne citadel, and in the woods and mountains of the Pyrenees. She heard stories whispering in the landscape. I’ve found the same, allowing my imagination to roam through the streets of Paris 2037, meeting fictional people struggling for survival, love and fulfilment. For me, the place where the story is set shapes and constrains the action, gives it colour and texture and strength.

Your Maisie Cooper mysteries are set in England, whereas the Alexandre Lamarque books take place in France. Was it a conscious decision to have two such distinct characters for the two series?

The Maisie Cooper Mysteries are ‘cosy’ crime novels, so they need to take place in a microcosm – a village or a theatre company. Alexandre Lamarque’s adventures in The Coming Storm take him from Paris to the Mediterranean to North Africa and beyond, because what’s at stake is macro – global, not local.
The locations are an expression of what’s at stake in each ‘world’. As their author, I sit on the same chair at the same time each day, creating something out of nothing, filling the page with imaginary dialogue, action and thoughts.

I love it when my worlds (books and theatre) collide. How important was it for you to write a novel involving theatre?

I agree with you about books and theatre and the joy of seeing them collide. The third Masie Cooper Mystery is set in a theatre because it provides all the elements necessary to a classical puzzle whodunnit: a single exciting location; a closed list of suspects and potential victims; the urgent deadline of the live performance; the jealousies and intrigues of a cast of ambitious characters.

You and your wife (author Kate Mosse) are both writers and theatre aficionados. Will we see any collaboration on a novel in future (perhaps a Tête-bêche), or do you keep your writing separate?

I have written several plays in collaboration and enjoyed each one with this guiding principle: never look back; take what the other person has written and build on it. For Kate and myself, at this point, we are paddling furiously (beneath the surface, of course) to keep up with our own novels. Kate is polishing the fourth part in the Joubert Family Chronicles (whose title remains a secret as I write). I have recently delivered the third volume in the Alexandre Lamarque trilogy, The Coming Fire. But, if we did write something together, I know we
would delight in it. Never say ‘never’ …

I am a huge fan of Kate’s books, especially her most recent The Ghost Ship; are there plans to workshop it or bring it to the theatre soon?

I haven’t been working on an adaptation of Kate’s brilliant recent novel The Ghost Ship, but on an earlier short story, based on Breton folklore, with a similar name: The Ship of the Dead. Working with some very talented technologists, the adaptation is not theatre, but a ground-breaking augmented reality experience,
viewable in headsets or on a smart phone. That’s the thing about a good story – it will work in many media. And I, like you, I’m a huge fan of Kate Mosse.

Thanks very much Greg Mosse and Moonflower Books for this fascinating insight.

The Coming Storm by Greg Mosse is published on 25^th April, £9.99 by Moonflower Books. Available online here.