Features Q&A and Interviews Published 21 July 2011

Lucy Kirkwood

Lucy Kirkwood's plays include Tinderbox and It Felt Empty When the Heart Went At First But It Is Alright Now. At this year's Latitude Festival she starred in her own short play, Housekeeping, part of Theatre Uncut.
Lois Jeary

It is not every day that an audience gets the opportunity to watch a playwright perform in their own work, and doing so can’t help but feel like something special. Yet the audience for Theatre Uncut‘s showcase at Latitude Festival were lucky enough to see not one, but two, playwrights giving voice to their own creations – Anders Lustgarten in his polemical monologue Fat Man, and Lucy Kirkwood in her darkly comic play Housekeeping.

As Lucy and I find a scrap of scrubby grass to kneel on after the performance, she admits her appearance as Coal – a ruthless, unfeeling “career politician”, hell bent on balancing the books by selling off people’s grandmothers – was not her initial idea. However, when the original actress Zawe Ashton had prior commitments, the play’s director Lucy Morrison suggested that Kirkwood stepped in. Yet rather than giving the performance she had always envisaged since the genesis of the piece, Lucy says that her interpretation of the role was influenced by seeing someone else in the part, and that she made conscious decisions that avoided repeating Zawe’s “brilliant” performance.

Despite a passion and background in acting, Housekeeping marks the first time Lucy has performed in her own work, and having now done so she is vocal about its positive influence. “I think it’s a healthy thing for a writer to do because you see the play completely differently. But the idea terrifies most writers, and rightly so.” As an actress she finds herself asking the same questions and facing the same problems as anyone approaching a text, and admits that even as the playwright she didn’t necessarily have all the answers. “There were points where I questioned ‘how has the writer got me from this line to this line? What sort of thought processes am I having?’ You have to slightly recalibrate and attend to those things where you’ve just not plotted it right. You should realise that as a writer of course, but sometimes you don’t until you’re the one that has to say the words and suddenly you’re feeling lost and helpless.”

Housekeeping borders on the absurd, with Coal testing out a grandmother for suitability for sale, yet in doing so draws attention to the creeping menace of privatisation that characterises Conservative politics. “What I wanted to stress was that Cameron, Osborne, the present Conservative government, are at pains to present themselves as young and caring,” Lucy says of her motivation for writing play. “Everything they do is consciously being presented in a way to say ‘forget about Thatcher, forget about what your idea of Toryism is, because we’re not it’. Actually the measures they’re putting in place are Old Tory.” In the play Mrs Dean confronts Coal with the line: ‘I’ve seen you before only your handbag was smaller and you had a string of pearls round your neck’, and while the other plays for Theatre Uncut look at the effects of the cuts on contemporary society, it is this allusion to the Conservative Party of old that I feel gives Housekeeping its greatest strength.”If you want to pretend it’s terribly twenty-first century and the caring face of the Tory party then that’s fine,” Lucy continues, “but it’s not. It’s exactly what Maggie would have been doing. The things that are motivating it are the same financial psychology, the same aims, the same people they’re trying to protect.”


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Lois Jeary

Lois holds an MA in Text and Performance, taught jointly between RADA and Birkbeck. In addition to directing and assistant directing for theatre, she also works as a freelance television news journalist for Reuters and has previously contributed to The Guardian.

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