Anisa Archer:
Welcome to Fifth Word’s Lights Up! podcast.
This is a series of interviews with pioneering women in UK theatre that we hope will inspire the next generation of theatre makers. The women featured all have a connection to the East Midlands region in England and have been interviewed on camera by young women like me, aged sixteen to twenty-one.
In this episode, playwright Amanda Whittington, is interviewed by me, Anisa Archer, on 20th February 2020 here at Derby Theatre.
Amanda has written over 30 plays for theatre and radio, and is one of the most widely-produced playwrights in the UK. Her plays Be My Baby and The Thrill of Love are studied for GCSE and A-level. Fifth Word produced her play Amateur Girl in 2014.
Her audio dramas include seven series of the award-winning D for Dexter on BBC Radio 4.
This is Anisa Archer on the 20th of February 2020, at Derby Theatre. Please, can you introduce yourself and tell me where and when you were born?
Amanda Whittington:
My name is Amanda Whittington. I was born in Nottingham in 1968.
I'm a playwright. So I write scripts, plays, dramas for theatre and radio. Mainly.
Anisa:
What is your connection to the East Midlands?
Amanda:
Born here. Family - parents from Nottingham, from West Bridgford. I was born here, raised, worked here until my mid-forties, so I've lived in Nottingham in the East Midlands most of my life.
Now I live in West Yorkshire, but I consider myself a pure East Midlander.
Anisa:
Lovely.
Anisa:
And what did your parents do for work?
Amanda:
Well, my dad was a quantity surveyor first. I think he left school at 15 and trained after he left school, went to night school and became a quantity surveyor. He did that until his 40s and then he had a kind of career change. He was always really good at arts and crafts and stuff with his hands, so he became a painter and decorator and started making furniture. And he also took up acting in later life, so he had a big turn in his life, really.
My mum was a mum and a housewife, until I was about 10, I think. So she was at home full-time, then she went back and retrained as a secretary and she went into estate agency. And she absolutely loved that. She loved working, it was really kind of the making of her.
Anisa:
Can you remember your first memory of theatre?
Amanda:
I can. I think we went to pantos and I remember always being that kid who was petrified that they were going to get called up onto the stage. And I remember once… so, Cinderella, and they had the slipper under somebody's seat, and I was thinking: ”Please let it not be my seat!
But my really first 'wow' memory of theatre was, I’d read the book Little Women, which my mum had given to me, by Louisa May Alcott, um, and it had a profound effect on me. I just absolutely loved it.
And that’s about - Jo, the central character of that, is a girl who wants to become a writer, and I just completely related to Jo. And it’s interesting because now there’s a new film version of Little Women and people are kind of talking about it again. So I'd read the book several times and then it was on at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham. I think I was seven at the time.
And so mum got tickets, and I went with my mum and my Nana - the three of us went - and that was really quite special because I don't think we'd ever gone out in the evening to do anything like that before. So it was, it was a big deal. And I can just remember the whole experience... And there’s a moment where Jo has her hair cut off and I remember the character of Jo coming in, having had long hair to short hair… and it is a kind of, it was just extraordinary, kind of, it’s an iconic thing in the book.
And I think just something clicked with me about the power and magic of telling stories on stage. I'd always been a reader, and I loved the book, but something about seeing it in the moment, in three dimensions, in that building, was just, you know, amazing. And I can see the whole thing now, still, it was kind of burned onto my consciousness.
Anisa:
What was the main trigger for you to want to work in the theatre?
Amanda:
Well, I think partly that [Little Women] planted a seed. Because prior to that, I think I'd always thought about being an author.
I don't know where it came from, where this desire to write came from, but as soon as I started reading, I wanted to write, I think, and tell stories. And I do remember me and my brother, we used to … well, I used to set up a little theatre in the garage and make him do plays for the other kids.
But then in secondary school, in the 80s, we had a fantastic drama department, I say department, it was a drama room and two teachers. I was at South Wolds [Academy] in Keyworth. I think it was one of the few schools in the county where you could do - certainly A-Level - so I got into drama through that, really. … By the end of that I was a massive theatre geek, really! (laughs)
We used to go to Nottingham Playhouse and see everything. We had 50p [pence] tickets that we got through the council, through school. So I just got, kind of, really exposed to some amazing ideas and work through that, that experience of school, and at the end of that, I was super keen to work in theatre.
But again, I didn't quite see myself as being able to be a playwright at the time. I thought that was something that would come a lot later. I remember looking, reading about Stage Management courses and wanting to do that, but not having, I don’t know, the confidence. Or just not applying. But that was at that age of sort of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, that's what I thought my way in could be.
Then I left school and I knew I wanted to write, and started as a freelance journalist. So, that's kind of how I started to make the transition into being a writer.
Anisa:
Yeah. Could you tell me more about what it was like being a freelance journalist?
Amanda:
Well, it's interesting because it was the late 80s.
I'd got a university place but I’d decided I didn't want to go. I was being quite rebellious. Well, it was a kind of rebellious - slash - having no confidence. You know– “I'm not going to university” - but actually it was feeling kind of, “I just don't know whether I can do this. I don't feel able to do it,” for all sorts of reasons, I think, I don't really know.
So, I took a year out and worked at Asda, and did various jobs because, you know, basically my parents said, “Well, if you're not going to university, you can go out there and work.” I learned a huge amount in that year.
But as this year came to an end, I thought, “I don't want to go to university. I want to be a writer. I'm going to do it now!”
And there was a scheme called the Enterprise Allowance Scheme in the 80s, which gave you forty pounds a week to set up your own business. It was a way of getting people off the ‘dole’ and it was amazingly kind of open. You put in your application, you had to go for kind of a half-day session where they explained all about it, and then off you went and you were signed up to it for two years.
So I went - I signed on the ‘dole’ for eight weeks in order to be eligible for this scheme. So I got on it, as a freelance journalist. They basically just sort of tick the paper, and go, “Right, that's you. You're a freelance journalist and this money will come to you, forty pounds a week for two years” which was quite a lot of money then.
So, I've got this government grant: forty pounds. I've got this title: freelance journalist. I've got my parents on my back because they thought I was crazy, and I had no experience of being a journalist. So I had quite a lot to prove, and quite a lot to live up to, really.
But back then, there was a boom in publishing. There was loads of quirky, weird little titles all over the place. So I just went to the library, looked at everything there was, and then started ringing editors. The first thing I did was for a magazine called Office Secretary, which dates it. Because there's no such thing as, you know there are no office secretaries anymore, you know? It’s like some kind of throwback, isn't it?
But because my mum worked in an office I did it on an aspect of work called the YTS [Youth Training] Scheme, where young people were employed as secretaries. And I interviewed my mum, and I interviewed other people and I produced this two thousand words for this magazine. They said they'd take it, and they did, they published it! And I thought, wow, gosh... this is possible.
Back then, it was surprisingly easy and different to today. We got paid, you know, you got paid quite well, then. It wasn't expected, like it is now for sort of online content, it wasn’t the case that you pitched stuff and wrote stuff and didn't get anything for it.
So, I just kind of learned on the job, really. I learned how to write to deadline, I learned how to write to a word count. I learned if I didn't write, I wouldn't get paid. So, that was a discipline. I wrote to the Nottingham Evening Post and said, “I'm nineteen and I'm a journalist. Can I write for young people?” And they said, “Yes”. So they gave me a weekly column. So it was a combination of my naivety, of just thinking, “Oh, well, you probably just ring up editors and they're OK with it.” And they were.
And the fact that I had to stick at it. And I do remember every month I used to think, “just hang on in for another month,” and I’d get something to get me to this month, and the next month, and the next month.' And it was like that for two years. Looking back, it probably seems easier than it was. Um, but that's how I got going. I just came up with ideas and got on the phone, basically. (Laughs)
Anisa:
It sounds really, really interesting.
What's your personal journey into the industry?
Amanda:
Well, starting as a journalist and doing that for the best part of - as a job - for about ten years, I think … from being nineteen to late-twenties…
So I wasn't writing literature, and I wasn't really trying to be especially intellectual about it, I was trying to just speak directly to the reader and tell the truth. And actually, what I found was, as a journalist when you're interviewing people, you record it and then you transcribe it, then you find the quotes and you find the story within that conversation that you're going to write up. So, that was the elements of me beginning to understand playwriting.
Because you're transcribing speech and you’re making speech into a story, and you’re using what people said. So actually, that's dialogue, really.
Which is all about what a play is, it's kind of what people say and all the subtext beneath it.
So as I was being a journalist, right, working as a journalist, I started writing plays in my early twenties. I started just sort of sending them to various theatre companies, and it went absolutely nowhere: nothing happened.
Then I met a woman called Gina Reeves, who ran a pub theatre company in Nottingham called Takeaway Theatre, which was a pub theatre company. In fact, I interviewed her for The Evening Post, and she was, you know, we just kind-of clicked, really. They didn't have any funding, they paid for everything by box office and they used to take shows around little pubs in Nottingham. And again it was part of that ‘80s create-your-own culture. And of course, that still happens today.
She said - at the end of this interview - I said, “Oh, I've written a play” and she said, “Oh, send it to me then.” So, I did. And she liked it and she put it on. So I started to learn about production as well by working with Takeaway. And it was brilliant, you know, and I loved every minute of it.
From that, my confidence grew a bit and I started sending work a bit more locally, to the Playhouse. And I got a rehearsed reading at the Playhouse, and I got a commission from New Perspectives Theatre Company in Mansfield - purely because I think I’d had my work on through Takeaway, and I'd had reviews, and I’d had, you know, quite decent reviews - only local ones - but then I could send that along with the script.
So I got commissioned to write a youth theatre play by New Perspectives, and I ended up doing three youth theatre plays with them, and then writing for their main rural touring company. And one of the plays we did with Takeaway I'd sent to Soho Theatre, with the review, and they saw something in that. So I got asked to go on their Writer Development programme. In my mid-twenties, I started to feel I was breaking out of Nottingham and making some kind of connection with the industry in a wider sense.
Anisa:
Yeah. When did you first recognize that you were pretty good at this whole writing career?
Amanda:
I’m not, I haven't yet. (Both laugh).
Um. Um, I think when... I'll tell you when, I think … I went on a workshop, at Soho Theatre and there were about four or five playwrights on this new writing workshop.
It was really good. It was the first time I'd actually been taught the principles of writing, because prior to that, I hadn't read a book about playwriting or anything, I'd just kind of gone from my own instinctive knowledge. And it was just great. And then at the end of this week, we all took an extract of something we'd written in and they got actors, professional actors, just to sort of explore the scenes a bit.
And I watched the others and they were all really good, and then I was really nervous when mine was coming up.
But I just saw something the actors connecting with the characters in a way I felt they hadn't quite connected with the others. It was just something, some indefinable thing where I thought, “Oh, I get it. I get what actors are looking for in character. I get that they’re looking, what they’re looking - they’re looking for this thing to play.”
You know, often a scene is about power, where the power lies. And I can’t even remember what it was, but it was just a bit of a lightbulb moment about what these words on a page … if you're a playwright, actually, what happens is then they go into the hands and mouths and hearts and heads of actors - and character is everything, because that's really what an actor connects with in theatre. So, I think that was ...I thought, “I think I can do that. I think I get it.”
From then on, I've always been about character over everything, really. Character-driven stories, and I think that has served me very well. Of course, when you get produced and get good feedback in the rehearsal room and from your audiences, that’s confidence building. So, my confidence built as I’ve gone through it.
But you still - but even now - when I'm writing the first draft of something new, I'm thinking, “I don’t know how to do it, I can't figure out. It's too difficult!” So, it never leaves you but I think that's quite good that it never leaves you. Because actually, if you become complacent, then what? You know?
Anisa:
Thank you for your honesty. (Amanda laughs).
I'd love to know more about your style of writing. Could you tell me more about the way that you do that?
Amanda:
Yeah. I'm interested in character. When I sit down to write, I suppose what I start with is a subject or a world, or... just…
I don't think I start particularly with character or voices. For instance, Be My Baby, which was the one I eventually went on to write for Soho [Theatre], that began as a competition entry.
They were doing a new writing competition on the subject of food. So, we had to write a ten minute play on the subject of food. So I thought about having an actor baking a cake on stage. And from that came the idea that it was a birthday cake for a child the character had given up for adoption, and every year she baked this cake to mark that moment.
So, I wrote this little play and put it in the competition and it didn't get anywhere. Apparently, there were six chosen to be performed and this was the seventh. But Soho said, “Oh, there's something about it we like, so see if you can develop some ideas.”
I started thinking about the character and what was happening to her now, with a grown-up adopted daughter somewhere out there. But also started thinking about what her backstory was and started reading about unmarried mother and baby homes, where in the sixties, she would have gone, probably, to have her baby and would have had the baby sort of forcibly taken from her and given up for adoption.
Reading about those, I thought “Oh, that's the play.” That’s amazing.
Because it’s an untold story, it’s about women's lives, which I was very interested in foregrounding in my work - instinctively interested in it - and then when it became noticed that I was doing that, I became very consciously more interested in doing it. So people go “Oh, why do you write so many female characters?” and you go well, “Because you ask the question, that's why!”
And, um, o really, Be My Baby began with this world of the home. And then from that, I started to build character and relationships. Who would be in this home? How would they relate to each other? What would they be thinking and feeling? What would they bring into the home? What would the character’s journey be?
So I think I look for an issue, or a world, or an injustice, or something that gives it... something I'm interested in. And I think as a journalist, researching and finding stories, is something I’ve taken through in my playwriting career.
So Amateur Girl was about the amateur porn industry. The Thrill of Love is about Ruth Ellis, who was the last woman to be hanged in Britain in the fifties. I’m doing a play at the moment about women's football in the twenties, the nineteen-twenties, it was massive and then it got banned. So again, that world of the women's football team and the political issue at its heart is where it all starts, I think. And then character, the story, grows out of that.
Anisa:
Thank you for sharing that.
What do you most struggle with in your process?
Amanda:
I think… structure. And also, the …uncertainty of it. That, you know, when you're commissioned … I’m very fortunate to be commissioned to write a play. But you start off with the seed of an idea, some thoughts, you have a conversation with a theatre company, but then you have to make that into a real piece of work. And it’s a contract to do that, there’s an expectation - and an expectation on yourself - that you will do it.
So, actually, just having the stamina to work through from that seed of an idea of a conversation: research it, think about it, come up with ideas, write a first draft, feel very insecure about the first draft, get some feedback, write a second draft that doesn't feel right either, and then you know going through several - many, many drafts - often over, you know, a few years, that can take. Then just having the stamina to keep believing in it, to keep the faith that sooner or later you'll go, “Yes, this is it. This is the play. This is what I wanted.”
And often that doesn't happen at the end of the writing process because you end up just running out of time. But it can happen in the rehearsal room, or it can happen in a second production, you can go, “Oh, yes, that's what I was doing!”
But it takes a lot of stamina, I think. And ultimately, even though you can have fantastic collaborators, you are on your own. You're on your own in that room with the computer. Day after day, just thrashing it out, trying to figure it out, trying to stay focused, trying to stay confident.
So, that's difficult. And I think, in a way, that's what makes writers ‘writers’, just keeping their bum on the chair till it's done, really.
Anisa:
I definitely agree with you on that one. (Laughs).
Amanda:
Yeah. Stamina is everything! (Laughs).
Anisa:
Can you tell me about the first play you wrote?
Amanda:
The first proper play I wrote was called Stand Up Cherry Pie.
It was a monologue. Because I thought a monologue might be easier to write than a multi-cast piece. It was about a stand-up comedian who kind of made it in that era before alternative comedy, when comedy was sexist and racist and abysmal - basically the kind of stuff I'd grown up watching on telly - which you now look back on and think “I cannot believe that stuff went out”. But she [the character] kind of came up through that route and navigated her way through, and then sort of had fame, then fell, and was lifting herself back up again.
We put it on with Takeaway, and we did that - two or three productions of that over the years. So, it was the very first, very, very first thing. And I haven't read it since we did it, so I'd probably look back now and think “Ooh, I don't know …!”.
But there are things in that play I'm still … Some people say as a writer, you're always trying to write the same story, always trying to write the same story better. That play was about women's lives, untold stories of women's lives, social history, all of that, entertainment, the sort of... the onstage character and the backstage character, and identity. And I think loads of those themes are still very much alive in my work.
And always will be, probably.
Anisa:
Yeah. When did the theatre become your career?
Amanda:
Well, it kind of gradually became my career in the late nineties. Soho Theatre started producing my work in the late nineties, so that was when the change was made, really. And I started earning money as a playwright and getting opportunities. Then, I kind of phased out the journalism and also got an agent, which - that meant that opened doors as well.
Anisa:
What gave you the confidence to pursue this as a career?
Amanda:
I think… It's hard to say because I don't know whether, in the beginning, it was confidence. I think it was a desire.
I felt like a writer and I wanted to be a writer as a child, but I hadn’t ever met any writers. And writers sort of seemed to me so distant, and so magical, and either living in ivory towers or long dead, or something.
Um. So I had no idea how to do it. I think it's a ‘thing’, isn't it? Where at eighteen, or seventeen or eighteen, we're supposed to be able to decide what we want to do and who we want to be, and leave home and go to a different city, and be that person and go into a career… And I just didn't feel like that at that age.
So, doing the freelance journalism was almost a way of backing away from all of that thinking, “Oh, you know, I've got to do something so I don't have to leave Nottingham and go to university, it's too daunting. I'll start writing because I want to be a writer one day, so I might as well do it now.”
And that looks like it takes a lot of confidence. I don't know if what I'm saying now I would have said then! I kind of styled it out and pretended I was much more confident than I was.
But there must have been something in me as well, that had a belief that I could do it. And I don't know where that belief came from. …
I don't know, it was just a light inside me. There was something that was struck. I don't know why, or how, but I just believed I could do it. Then I had to kind of give my character the confidence to carry that through, if that makes sense. You know, my inner self had the belief and I had to learn confidence, I think. But I learnt it by doing it really, which is the best way to learn anything, I think. And it was stressful, but it kind of worked out in the end.
(Laughs). Yeah, it did, yeah!
Anisa:
What was your biggest setback in your career?
Amanda:
That's a really good question, actually. I don't know as I've had anything that felt like a setback.
I think that we're now being more aware of a lack of representation in theatre, and of female playwrights being historically less valued, or the subjects that women write about being slightly devalued as being ‘domestic’ or sort of ‘shallow’ in some way? There used to be the idea of only men can write the big political plays on the big stages in the National Theatre.
And I wasn't writing that kind of play. So, I think certain avenues of theatre, certain routes have not been as open to me as a woman.
But having said that, my whole career and the work I've done has been based on writing about women's lives and my femaleness. So I wouldn't trade that, I wouldn’t trade that for anything. So, I wouldn't call that a setback as such, but it's an obstacle that's always been there, I think. And it's, you know, it’s still there.
And it's certainly … I'm really happy to see there's such a wide and candid discussion about it among female playwrights, because there weren't that many female playwrights when I started. I didn't really know anybody. And I think the discussion and debate and awareness that we now have is going to change things for the better.
Anisa:
What do you most enjoy about your job?
Amanda:
I enjoy the fact that I don't have to go to the office, or wear a suit, or sit in traffic at seven every morning. I enjoy that freedom, that personal freedom of being able to work from home and being able to manage my own time and be free.
I always feel there's a lot of insecurity in being a freelancer - financial insecurity - you never know from one year to the next whether you're going to get work or what-have-you. But I've always seen that as a motivation and I’ve always managed, somehow, to keep going.
And I still love to write. I still love to sit down at my desk - if there's not too much crazy time pressure or too much going on - I'm really happy writing. And if I can get all the other stuff out my head about what people are going to think of it and how it's going to be received and whether I'm going to get it in in time; if I can just purely focus on the writing, I love that and I still love it.
If I didn’t love it anymore, I would stop, I'd have to stop. I don’t think you can do it if you don't love it. So, yeah, the writing.
Anisa:
Yeah. I agree, I agree with that.
What isn't quite so good about your job?
Amanda:
What isn't quite so good about my job is (sighs) - I think the time it takes to write something, to get it right. I think juggling four, five, or six different projects sometimes is hard. Which is not something I'd complain about because most writers would be delighted to have it, so it's a nice problem to have. But often, I am working on several things at once. Not in the same day, but certainly every few days, I might be chopping and changing to something else. I would love to be able to just be working on one thing for a sustained period of time, so that can be difficult.
I just think the whole wider issues of the politics in the industry is difficult, as I've said about representation, equality, whose voice gets heard and whose doesn't. All that can be very dispiriting, really, because theatres are, you know, they're not run by committee. They're run by individual people who make those commissioning decisions, and those gatekeepers: you know, if the gatekeeper likes you and opens the door, that's good, but it's not the most accessible industry for a lot of people, still. So, that is a frustration really.
Anisa:
I'd like to talk to you about the changes in the industry for women.
Amanda:
Yeah.
Anisa:
What have you noticed?
Amanda:
I have noticed, I think there's more young women writing now, that's something I’ve noticed. There's still not an abundance of opportunities. I think there's a recognition that women's voices matter more than they seemed to matter; the subjects women write about are more worthy of consideration than maybe they were when I started out… But I still think there's quite a long way to go.
I think on the other hand, what's interesting - that people are waking up to - is that it's always been the case that women buy theatre tickets. You know, women, statistically, are the ones who book the tickets to go with their friends or their partners. And so it makes commercial sense to write plays and stories from a female perspective about women's lives.
You know, we can write anything we want to write. And I think we're still trying to fight that battle. Just as I think we kind of thought feminism had won, now we're going, “Oh, my God, there's still so many more battles to fight.”
And theatre is one of them.
Anisa:
What are the advantages of being a woman in your role?
Amanda:
I think you can find an audience you can speak very directly to, as I say, because women are the theatre goers and the theatre ticket buyers. And I think if you can connect with that audience and speak directly to that audience, it keeps your work alive.
One thing that's interesting and kind of a side thing about my work is that it gets done extensively on the amateur circuit, and amateur theatre companies have predominantly female members. Historically, there’s been a dearth of plays with strong female casts, or just numerically more women than men in. Be My Baby, Ladies’ Day and Ladies Down Under - the sequel - or The Thrill of Love get I mean, sort of, seventy-five, eighty productions a year. Every week one of those plays are on somewhere and it's simply because women in those companies want to play those roles and want to tell those stories. So that, in terms of keeping the work alive - keeping plays alive that are sort of twenty years old - Be My Baby is coming on twenty years old, Ladies' Day is fifteen - and the fact that they're still being done regularly in villages and communities across the country is because of that female connection, really.
And that's been a huge advantage to my career, accidentally, because I never set out to do that. Also, financially, because it’s an income stream as well.
So, it's not always about having, you know, the big critically acclaimed show in London that's going to make your career; actually that’s been happening very quietly, without any kind of acknowledgement or any kind of recognition, really. But it's happening, it's real. You don't really want a play to be done once - and even published - but then put on a shelf to got out once every ten years.
You know, the fact that those plays are living and breathing now is because they're by a woman, about women, for women. And I'm as happy with that as I am, you know, with getting great review in The Guardian, you know? Lovely, great review in The Guardian, but where then?! You want your work to live. And that's been an accidentally surprising and wonderful thing about my work, I think.
Anisa:
While doing research on you, Amanda, I did come across, I think it was a quote from The Guardian about you being the most consistent woman, in regards to playwriting. How did you feel when you maybe read that quote or you came across that quote?
Amanda:
Well, it’s a bit of a double-edged sword, really. Because it's brilliant to hear it said your work is consistently popular or you're the biggest-selling female playwright. But I don't want to be... I'm… I’m one of the biggest-selling playwrights then, if I'm one of the biggest-selling female playwrights. And to genderise it - in a way that men's writing never is - is now, I feel quite angry about, in a way. I mean, that quote is a few years old, I think. When I first see that quote, I go, “Oh, that's really nice.” And then I think, over the years, actually, “Why is it gendered? Why?” Because it is like we're this sort of second subcategory of playwrights, you know?
Where there’s like the male canon of playwrights, then there's Caryl Churchill, and then there's the rest of us. You know? You don't hear Caryl Churchill very often called “the greatest female playwright”. She's one of our greatest playwrights: end of. But most of us get that sticker put on us and, yeah, I feel quite militant about it now.
And I would challenge it now, in a way I wouldn't have done.
Going back to your question about what's changed, really, I’d feel confident to challenge that now in a way that, probably, fifteen years ago I wouldn't have.
So, yeah. Yeah… Obviously, it's always lovely to get a compliment, but you've also got to be aware of what context you're being placed in, I think.
Anisa:
Thank you for sharing. What are the disadvantages of your role in your career?
Amanda:
As a woman? The disadvantages? …I think having to work twice as hard to prove yourself. Having to justify why your stories might be political and meaningful, because I think you're allowed to be entertaining and funny... but actually, I’d say that my work is... the choices that I make are political choices.
The choice in Be My Baby to put six women on stage, in that play, with no male characters, was a political choice. And I don't think any of that got really noticed at the time.
Also, when that play came out, it was the kind of, what they call the in-yer-face theatre of Sarah Kane and all of that, and I think Be My Baby looked quite domestic and traditional against those.
I think now it's probably being reassessed a bit. It had a fantastic production at Leeds Playhouse in 2019, and for me it was like watching the play again because it was a new generation of actors and director and everything, kind of coming to this play as if it was a big piece of political theatre.
So I think the disadvantages have been, you know, having to justify and prove your worth, really, um, instead of just being able to get on with it. But having said all that, I wouldn't change anything, you know? Because I am female and that's the perspective I naturally write from. So, to feel aggrieved about that would be wrong, really, and I'm very proud of that. I'm very glad that I could tell those stories.
Anisa:
I know you just said you wouldn't change anything, but if you did have a magic wand and you could change one thing in the industry that you are in, what would it be?
Amanda:
Mmm.
You know what, I think I would change this relationship between London and the rest of the UK [United Kingdom]; because the whole - the idea of the National Theatre being this concrete building in the middle of London, and a very elitist organisation, from my experience and other people's experience, a very patriarchal organisation - that calls itself the National Theatre. And it's not, you know, the national theatre. We need to really rethink that. And I hate this term ‘the regions’. There's no such thing as the regions because that's, again, patriarchal London and everybody around it. The regions is the UK, that's British theatre. As much I love the West End in London, that's not British theatre. What we’re doing out here, in all the cities and towns and villages across the country is British theatre. So, I’d like to see radically change in terms of our perception of that hierarchy of the industry, and where the power lies, and where the status lies, and where the important work is done. I would like that to be smashed to bits.
Anisa:
What's your greatest achievement?
Amanda:
Just staying. Sticking at it. Staying here, sticking at it. Stamina.
Anisa:
Is there a play that you're most proud of?
Amanda:
You know in one sense you say it's the one I'm writing at the moment because that's the one that feels most immediate, and one hopes will get better and better. You always hope the play you're writing now is your best play in terms of everything about it, content and theme and style and all that. So, the one I am always very interested in is what I'm writing or what I'm going to write. I don’t really like looking back too much.
So you don't want to think that the thing you did in your mid-twenties is the great thing that you did. So, always, it’s the one now and the next one, I think, that I'm hoping will be the one.
Anisa:
How would you suggest a person can get into this industry?
Amanda:
Everything's changed since I started. There was no internet, you know, all we had was a phone and a typewriter. That's what I started with, and obviously, the nature of communications, and media and performance, and all of that, is changing, although obviously theatre is still theatre. But I think it’s harder because it’s harder to get paid for stuff, the public sector is shrinking and so there's less money for development.
But I think it’s the same as it always was. If you've got something to say – and you tell your truth as a writer and that is there on the page - that will be heard. Because actually it's quite rare.
You know, you can read a lot of new scripts that might be quite well-crafted but have nothing to say. But you can read something that’s a mess but you go, “Oh, my God, that voice! This!”
And I would say to young, new writers, don't try to be original, try to be truthful. Tell your truth because if it's your truth, it will be original. Because no one's got your life and no one's had the journey you've had, and no one's experienced the world quite like you do.
So, I think you've just got to write - find your truth and find your voice - get it on the page somehow, send it out and trust that someone will hear it. It might not be the first person, but theatres are always looking out for those voices.
So, I just say - go for it.
Anisa:
What advice would you give your younger self?
Amanda:
I would say you're onto something. Just have faith. Be a little bit more confident. Don't worry. Just keep at it because you're going to be able to do what you want to do. So, chill out (laughs). Get on with it.
Anisa:
Lastly, is there anything you'd like to talk about that I haven't asked you already?
Amanda:
I suppose I would say that one of the great things about writing - and being a playwright - is that everybody's route into it is different. So, this is just my story. And because I did it this way, doesn't mean ‘that's the way it's done’.
But for writers, there is no set way. You can invent your own way in, find your own way through towards your truth. That is yours alone. So, I’d say, listen to writers like me talking, but don't think “I should be doing it that way”, because everybody's different.
Anisa:
Thank you so much for answering these questions. It's been a privilege and pleasure talking to you, Amanda. Thank you very much.
Amanda:
Thank you.
Anisa:
We hope you’ve found these interviews as inspiring, funny and honest as we have.
We’ve discovered so much about theatre whilst making them.
If you know someone who might also enjoy listening, please share and recommend this series, and follow us on X @ FifthWord, and use the hashtag Lights Up! This helps us to grow our audience, and share these inspiring stories with even more people.