Game On: The Habits Brings Dungeons & Dragons to the Stage

Lyn Gardner catches up with Jack Bradfield before his debut play opens at Hampstead Downstairs.

Playwright Jack Bradfield wasn’t a keen Dungeons and Dragons player when he started listening to a podcast of RPG live play sessions of the fantasy game made by a company of actors called Critical Role. He was hooked.

“It’s like listening to an improvised radio play or a form of shared storytelling, and as you listen, you get to know the characters the actors are playing and who they are out of the game, and the boundaries between fantasy and reality become more and more permeable. I found that really interesting.”

He began thinking about writing a play set during a game of Dungeons and Dragons, in which the audience would experience the story as though they had double vision because they would see it both through the characters and the roles they played within an unfolding game. Bradfield realised that the idea had legs when he was talking to some friends who lived in a shared household and who were avid Dungeons and Dragons' players.

“They told me that their arguments about the washing up or the rent found their way into the game, and those tensions were aired in that space. One person said that they had worked through their father issues through playing the game. It was a real spark moment when I went, ‘There is definitely a play in that.’.” That play, The Habits, opens at Hampstead Theatre. Set in a board games café, WarBoar, in Bromley, it brings together five people from different generations who are playing a long-running game of Dungeons and Dragonss. Their connections outside the game only gradually emerge. As they do, the stakes in the game become ever higher for both the characters, the characters they inhabit in the game, and for the audience watching. Reading it, I was reminded of Gabrielle Zevin’s best-selling novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow about the lives and friendship of two video game makers, which riffs on the possibility of storytelling and gaming as a means of finding succour and redemption and dealing with grief and guilt.

Bradfield points out that for many people, gaming in many forms offers an opportunity to take back control and offer the power to change things, a power that they may not feel they possess in the real world.

The cleverness of The Habits is that because the play is simultaneously set in two worlds—the real world and the fantasy world—and the audience knows that they are sitting in a theatre watching a fictional story unfold, the potential is there for us to see with a kind of laser double vision. Text and subtext and the layers within both are magnified as if looking through a prism. No wonder that on the title page of the script, Bradfield quotes his great heroine Ursula K. Le Guin: “For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it’s true.”

 

To read the full interview visit Stage Door via the button below.

 

The Habits runs Downstairs at Hampstead Theatre from 28 February to 5 April.

 

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE

BOOK THE HABITS HERE