Playwright Holman Seeks the Quiet Amid the Storm : Holman Seeks the Quiet Amid the Storm

There’s a simple reason why Robert Holman entitled his dramatic trilogy “Making Noise Quietly.” It’s what the British playwright hopes his work will do.

“On the whole, my plays are not loud,” said Holman, who is a bit on the quiet side himself. “There are no Amazons jumping about. I suppose my work is contemplative because that’s the nature of me.”

But not necessarily the nature of his subjects.

In Holman’s “Making Noise Quietly” (at Taper, Too) war is the thematic link that binds three otherwise individual stories. The first, about a Quaker deciding whether to fight, is set during World War II in Kent, England. The second, about a woman and the naval officer who has come to inform her of her son’s death, is set in Redcar in Northern England during the Falklands War. The third, which has a contemporary setting in Germany’s Black Forest, centers on a British private who is AWOL with his stepson.

“I don’t really plan the work,” said Holman, 36, whose “Across Oka” is being staged at Stratford-Upon-Avon by the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It just happens. I work slowly; most things take me about a year to do. The process is one of just going on--and seeing if anything interesting crops up. I wait for a character to say something that interests me, then I try to go with that. In this case, I wanted to write about war, express my feelings about it: what it is, its morality. Often I don’t know how I feel about something, and the writing process is a way of finding out.”

Here, the scope is intentionally narrow, composed of two- and three-character groupings. “In each of the plays, a character meets someone who helps sort out the problems he’s got,” Holman said. “Each play has a separate identity, and I think each stands on its own. But I hope that when you put them together, they make four as opposed to three--that they’re more than their sum total. Always when you write, you try to make the work end up being more than it is.”

The sentiments may ring noble, but the writer, who comes from the small northern English town of Guisborough, has few preconceptions about the importance of his work. “I don’t believe playwriting is an intellectual pursuit at all,” he said. “It’s an emotional experience, not an intellectual one. These plays come from an emotional place. I’m not saying they don’t have ideas in them--because I think they have. But that’s not the overriding impulse. When you see one of my plays, you either connect with it (emotionally) or you don’t.

“You don’t change people by working on their intellect. I think you do that by working on their emotions, making them feel. I have to be moved when I’m writing a play, otherwise the audience never will. I see what I do as a process of education. And since I’ve learned something, I hope the audience will be affected by it, entertained, maybe provoked. . . . “

Holman (who has had 26 of his plays staged--most of them in Britain) appears genuine in his enthusiasm for learning. Ask him what he knows now about playwrighting--as opposed to when he was 19 and wrote his first play--and he says, “Absolutely nothing. I mean, I know a little more about the nature of an evening in the theater, what makes a play work and what doesn’t, how to put a moment across on stage.”

He doesn’t think it counts for any longevity. “In England,” Holman said, “most playwrights last about a decade. Plays are so much about energy. Once you convince yourself you’re good at something, you stop finding out about it. And I think it’s that finding out--plus the energy--that makes the work good and holds an audience’s interest. If you stop (challenging yourself), the audience will stop too. They won’t sense any excitement.”

For Holman (who began writing revue sketches in high school “because I couldn’t act”), the emotional lures--for self-expression and growth--remain strong. “I believe passionately in the imagination,” he said. “And I make a lot of imaginative leaps. But, yes, what I write is very rooted in what I am: my background, the places I grew up, the people I knew--especially as a child. In the end,” he said with a sheepish smile, “the work is really about me. But you’d have to get to know me very well before you’d see that.”