The Ghost Theatre clatters between the slums and the palaces, the streets and the rooftops, and folds Queen Elizabeth in with a rogues’ gallery of crooks. It’s an excellent novel – riotous and abundant, full of vivid, dirty life. “So these children were as famous as you could be without being high-born, while at the same time being the lowest of the low, utterly despised. “Almost every Londoner went to the theatre,” Osman explains. Most of his characters were real-life Blackfriars boys, the prime time entertainers of their day. Then he saw a BBC documentary, Abducted, about children kidnapped from the streets of Elizabethan London to perform at the Blackfriars theatre and the missing pieces fell into place. His original idea was to spin the story of a band – specifically the Sex Pistols – set in 16th-century England, but that felt too gimmicky, too thin a conceit. But as I get older, books become more important What else am I going to do but write?” I always thought music seemed the pinnacle of human existence. People always say: ‘How do you find the time to do both?’ But I don’t start work until nine at night – the rest of the day I’m sitting in the hotel or in places like this.
“Touring is absolutely brilliant for writing. The Ghost Theatre, he explains, was partly written on the road. Osman is imposingly tall and the room is comically small, but this is the world that he knows his home for the next 90 minutes. We meet in the wings of Bristol’s O2 Academy, at the tail end of Suede’s latest UK tour. And if they play the role well enough, who’s to say it’s not true? They might perform the role of a rock star, an office worker, a van driver, a writer. Everybody performs, whether they’re on stage or not.
It’s a book about performance, he says, because the subject fascinates him. Now he has written it, too, in the form of a novel about star-crossed child actors in Elizabethan London. Osman has experienced this at first hand as the bassist in Suede, the group he co-founded in the late 80s with his schoolfriend Brett Anderson.
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