Flowers writer Will Sharpe on bringing Japanese comedy to the British stage and screen

Will Sharpe, writer and director of the Channel 4 comedy drama Flowers, which returns for a second series this summer, was born in London but lived in Japan until the age of eight.

“I remember as a kid watching Japanese comedies, sketch shows, that I’m sure are out of date and possibly frowned upon now,” he says. “Some of my earliest comedy memories are from Japanese shows.”

That early immersion in Japanese humour – plus a healthy dose of British slapstick from the likes of Mr Bean – proved influential when it came to making his dark six-parter about depressed children’s writer Maurice Flowers (Julian Barratt), whose ever so slightly unhinged music teacher wife (Olivia Coleman) is at a loss how to help him.

“One of the things that I wanted to incorporate was a flavour of Japanese comedy that was a little bit louder or a bit more stylised,” the 31-year-old recalls. We see this most clearly in the character of Shun – played by Sharpe himself – a quirky illustrator who has come from Japan to work with Maurice and finds himself a fish out of water in the context of this very English family.

Shun, a character that verges on parody but revealed increasing depths as the first series went on, allows Sharpe a subtle means of exploring the stereotyping of Asian characters.

“That felt like a more interesting starting point for saying something about why we’re always at the computer in a sci-fi movie telling the good guy that there’s a spaceship on its way. Or the guy who’s good at maths in a group of friends. Why is it always that, and never complex or unexpected?”

If Flowers is an opportunity to experiment with some of the comedy tropes he enjoyed as a child, Sharpe’s latest project, translating and adapting a play by legendary Japanese writer and director Hideki Noda, is a masterclass in the form.

One Green Bottle, which opens at the Soho Theatre this month following its premiere in Tokyo, tells the story of a family that descends into tragicomic chaos one evening when mother Boo (played by Noda himself), father Bo (Kathryn Hunter) and daughter Pickle (Glyn Pritchard) each refuse to stay in to look after the family’s pregnant dog.

Sharpe has had a surprisingly varied career, including making two feature films (one of which, Black Pond, led to a Best Newcomer Bafta nomination), spending a year as an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, and appearing as a recurring character in the TV drama Casualty. But collaborating with Noda on One Green Bottle was an entirely new way of working.

Sharpe had heard of Noda – who has written and directed more than 50 plays, received some of the top honours in Japanese theatre, and been artistic director of the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre (TMT) since 2010 – but he wasn’t familiar with his work. So when the director’s team approached him after a producer saw a screening of Flowers at a television festival in France, Sharpe went straight to his mother, who is Japanese.

“She was really excited,” he says. “She was the first clue that I should be quite excited.”

One Green Bottle began life at the TMT in 2010 as the slapstick Japanese language comedy Omote ni Deroi! (which roughly translates as ‘Let’s take this outside’). Sharpe read a literal English translation of the script and found the project intriguing, but it wasn’t until he watched a DVD of the original show that he was really able to get a handle on it.

“The set design is bright colours, quite surreal, the delivery was lightning fast, and the performance style was quite heightened and stylised and comedic – and that’s when it clicked for me that this was actually really interesting and fun,” he says.

Sharpe travelled to Tokyo and began an education in some of the forms of Japanese culture referenced in One Green Bottle, from traditional theatre like kabuki and noh, to Johnny’s All Stars, a sort of boy band song and dance extravaganza: “I felt like I was pretty much the only guy in the audience; a lot of them are middle-aged women.”

The process of working with Noda on the script of One Green Bottle was intense but enjoyable, Sharpe recalls, the two writers digging down into the differences between English and Japanese humour. Physical humour translates, he discovered, but trying to work out how best to get Noda’s trademark wordplay across to British audiences was more of a challenge; Sharpe reckons we “get punned out” sooner than our Japanese counterparts.

They also discovered a shared storytelling sensibility: “The feeling that humour doesn’t make something less moving or less pertinent but sometimes can help it, to offset it, to give it the right space, rather than coming across too earnest. That was a really fortuitous crossover in the Venn diagram.”

Another reason Sharpe jumped at the project was the opportunity to “do something that felt unfamiliar to me and different, a sort of shock to the system”.

“I’m trying to read someone else’s feelings and their voice and to be free at the same time so it doesn’t feel too rigid in the script,” Sharpe explains. “I’m trying to deliver his vision; I’m a facilitator.” Used to working with “facilitators” himself, in the shape of script editors, TV producers and channel executives, the writer-director has found it illuminating to experience the relationship from the other side.

“Cycling is a good analogy,” he says. “If you’ve recently cycled, when you’re in a car you don’t feel like, ‘What are they doing?! They’re insane!’ And if you’ve driven recently, when you’re on a bike you don’t feel like they are just trying to kill you.”

Sharpe is juggling post-production on series two of Flowers – “I would love to talk about it, but I can’t” – with tweaks to the script of One Green Bottle ahead of its London run when we meet. While he’s got a few writing projects in the offing, what he’s really looking forward to is some time off to work out what’s next.

The writing process, he says, “is unreasonably hard. I find it rewarding but it’s also the most gruelling part of the process. Not physically, but mentally. Every time I’ve had a bit of time away from writing I forget that it’s actually really hard.”

It may be difficult, but as anyone who’s seen Sharpe’s work would surely agree, it’s surely worth the effort.

‘One Green Bottle’ is at Soho Theatre 27 April-19 May (sohotheatre.com)