Award-winning business journalist Judi Bevan and her husband adopted a baby from China more than 2 decades ago. Now in midlife, she’s turned her attention from writing about business to penning the play Too Many Books, informed by the experience and the emotional journey of parents seeking to adopt.
Not so long after my 18-month-old daughter arrived from China, Eleanor Mills was at my table, thanks to Bob Hoskins and a rainstorm.
I vividly remember her and our Sunday Times photographer, Sally Soames, coming to shelter in my kitchen and meeting Josephine, who had recently come to us. They were due to interview Hoskins, who was parked in his Winnebago in a side street, round the corner from our house in Rotherhithe by the river. He was keeping them waiting outside in the pouring rain so they knocked on my door.
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Eleanor and Josephine took to each other, and within minutes Josephine was laughing and playing with toys on our kitchen floor. That was the spring of 1998.
Eleanor and the photographer already knew the story of the long battle we had waged with British authorities to adopt our daughter, thanks to an article my husband John Jay had written in The Sunday Times. Now, 27 years later, I’ve written a play – called Too Many Books – informed by our experience of adoption and those of others.
About Too Many Books
The play is the story of one couple’s journey through the adoption process that veers from optimism to stark realism, with a bit real-world farce thrown in – centred on the contents of the couple’s bookshelf! Now it’s debuting at the Upstairs at the Gatehouse, Highgate, from February 26 to March 16.
For us, the process took us three and a half years from our first letter to our local council to flying to Hangzhou in China finally to collect her. There had been many bumps along the way, all of which makes for good drama.
Set in the mid-1990s, Too Many Books shows a couple full of misty-eyed optimism that soon evaporates under the hostility of social workers brimming with preconceptions and prejudice.
Where the title comes from
I’ve called the play Too Many Books because my husband and I were told one reason we were inappropriate prospective adopters was exactly that. The thinking was that well-educated white middle-class people would put too much pressure on adopted children with different social or ethnic backgrounds. (They obviously weren’t anticipating Tiger Mothers.)
The Tory politician, Michael Gove, himself adopted, was appalled that some social workers, long after our battle, still maintained such views. As Education Secretary, he declared: “It is outrageous to deny a child the chance of adoption because of a misguided belief that race is more important than any other factor. And it is simply disgraceful that a black child is three times less likely to be adopted from care than a white child … I promise you I will not look away when the futures of black children in care continue to be damaged.”
Why I decided to write my play
So what led me, after a 20-year career as a financial journalist and author of 1 novel and 4 business books, to throw all the cards in the air and write a play for the theatre? I am, it seems, part of a trend. Third careers are frequent these days, with a 30% of people over 50 looking for new opportunities, according to a recent survey.
Writing is an area where ageism is less of a problem and journalists have long transferred their skills from newspapers and magazines to books, be they novels or non-fiction. But journalists writing for the theatre is rarer.
Shortly after I decided to take up playwriting, I soon found out why.
The challenge of writing it
When, as with a play, all the information has to be transmitted through dialogue, costumes and scenery, the technique is – dare I say it – dramatically different. There is no room, as in a novel, for explanations of the character’s inner world or how he or she may be perceiving events. It is all down to dialogue and acting.
The long didactic speeches favoured by Bernard Shaw are forbidden in modern theatre. Hence it has taken 5 years of attending playwriting courses, first with Jemma Kennedy, writer of Genesis Inc, about a couple’s trials with IVF, and latterly with Conor Montague, a playwright and author who heads the drama and fiction team at the Irish Centre in London, to get to this point.
My mother influenced my desire to write a play
My desire to write drama is partly due to the influence of my mother, who wrote 2 plays while I was growing up. As an actress, she played Peter Pan aged 16, then worked for 10 years in weekly repertory theatre. By the time the Second World War broke out, she had given up acting, becoming an accomplished teacher of ballroom dancing in the days of Victor Sylvester.
Yet theatre was her first love. So, stuck in the London suburbs with a husband and daughter, she began teaching drama to all-women groups – to earn cigarette money. She also directed plays for the rather grandly named Southgate Theatre Guild. In fact, her shows were the only productions that made a profit and kept the amateur group financially afloat.
I grew up attending rehearsals during the school holidays, taking part in crowd scenes in melodramas such as Sweeney Todd and playing small roles where children were needed as in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House.
My mother’s success with her plays
My mother also produced one-act plays with her all-women groups – popular in the Fifties and Sixties. They would enter amateur festivals around the country and my mother’s group’s invariable won the award for best drama, best play, best this or that and quite often nearly all of them. I have fond memories of the jubilant atmosphere on the coach home.
Increasingly though, she found it hard to track down good one-act plays. So she wrote one. A jolly romp entitled A Kings Command and set in Nell Gwynne’s dressing room, it not only won her group many festivals but it sold to all-women groups around the world – wherever English was the main language. Royalties for Beatrice Leader née Muir continued for the rest of her life!
Wise advice I got from Michael Caine
When I was a teenager, she enrolled me in The Junior Drama League, which met during the holidays in London’s Fitzroy Square, where we were mentored by members of the National Youth Theatre. I vividly remember going to an afternoon talk in the Criterion Theatre given by the father-and-daughter team of Sir Michael and Vanessa Redgrave.
When it was time for questions I piped up nervously:
“How do you know if you should become an actor?”
Sir Michael was very firm: “Only do it if you can’t contemplate doing anything else,” he said.
Instead, I took the journalism path
Instead, I became a journalist, landing on The Sunday Telegraph and The Sunday Times business pages, which were growing rapidly at the time. To outsiders, the business world may seem grey and dull, but close-up, during the 1980s. it was full of drama, intrigue, highs and lows. Success in business makes for fabulously rich heroes such as Bill Gates as well as anti-heroes like Donald Trump and Sir Philip Green. For some, failure ended in bankruptcy or even prison. I was lucky enough to interview most of them.
My novel, The Insiders, depicted that world mixed with sex and shopping and got great reviews. But by the time it was published, we were in early 1990s and the era had passed. “The lights just went off,” in the words of one New York trader.
I had written the novel after attending a three-day course called Story Structure given by the now legendary Robert McKee, an American who had been a writer on the Columbo detective TV series. The course was also aimed at scriptwriters.
My early, imperfect attempts
My first attempt at a script was about the early days of Marks & Spencer. I had written a history of M&S in 2007 but I wanted the play to concentrate on the time when the founder’s son, 19 year-old Simon Marks, nearly lost control of the company after his father Michael dropped dead in the street. A close-run shareholder battle for control ensued. It felt promising as a drama, but in the end, it went in the drawer.
Next I tried my hand at a play about a woman who reports her son-in-law for child abuse of her grandchildren, resulting in horrific consequences. Based on a true story, in the end, it just felt too dark.
Finally, I decided the most promising story was closest to home and I began work on a quest by a middle-class couple to adopt a baby daughter from China.
The story of Too Many Books
After several miscarriages and failed attempts at IVF, they discover the route to adopting a young child in the UK is closed to anyone older than 40 years old. In 1992, however, the Chinese opened their doors to adoption by foreigners of the thousands of baby girls who had ended up in orphanages because of the
Beijing government’s one-child policy. China only shut those doors last September.
One of Robert McKee’s commandments is: ‘Thou shalt rewrite’ and Too Many Books has been through several versions, with scenes workshopped several times in my writing group. The director, Christopher Hunter, formerly with the RSC, also made insightful suggestions that helped me improve the story.
Why my story still resonates now
Times have changed for the better in the adoption world since the mid-1990s and some social worker prejudices have been broken down. Even so, in 2023 there were more than 80,000 children in care and fewer than 3,000 of these were put up for adoption. More work needs to be done.
Too Many Books explores in an intimate way the hope and difficulties of adoption, identity, the cultural displacement (still a factor in UK transracial adoptions) and the emotional sacrifices parents make. It will resonate deeply with anyone touched by adoption or the longing for family.
Judi Bevan is the author of Too Many Books, which will be performed at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, Highgate from February 26 to March 16. Tickets are available here.
