Katie Bonna on writing and performing The Celebrated Mrs Inchbald
What made you choose this subject?
Elizabeth Inchbald’s late 18th century world is in many ways removed from the early 21st century. Do you see parallels?
Inchbald herself was a famous woman and a successful writer and this placed her under a certain amount of pressure to maintain her public face and keep her real self private. She tempered and restricted herself constantly in order to be accepted and respected as an independent, business woman, quite a feat in the late 1700s. It has been interesting for me to explore this and how our attitude to “celebrity” and the fame culture has evolved.
Have you written for this theatre company before?
How closely have you worked with the director and the designer?
This will be the third re-staging since then (including one performance at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane ) and I have been reworking the piece with Abigail Anderson (the associate director).
Abi is an incredible director for pushing you to explore the detail and thought processes of your text, making it a completely present piece of theatre. Having written the play, it might seem an unnecessary exercise to work through these ideas but, actually, as an actor, I had not examined the text anywhere near as thoroughly as I would have done had it been written by somebody else. I found myself undermining my own writing and Abi has shaken me out of that.
Have you always wanted to write plays? Or is this a one-off?
At the end of my drama school training, I wrote a play for my final project and enjoyed the creative freedom it allowed me. Since then I have been lucky to have directors interested in my writing and was encouraged to complete that play and produce it by the director Jessica Swale, who still supports my new writing and recently work-shopped my latest play Liquorice and Smoke-Rings at Out Of Joint (of which she is associate director). I’ve always loved writing and was convinced I was going to write books as a child. Nowadays, the idea of writing a novel terrifies me but I love playwriting.