Brief Encounter With … Playwright & screenwriter Abi Morgan

Over the subsequent decade, Morgan has been kept
very busy writing for television and film – winning the 2005 BAFTA for Best Drama Serial for Sex
Traffic
and more recently triumphing with The Hour, her
BBC series set during the Suez Crisis. She also wrote the script for Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady, which is released this month.

But
aside from a couple of short, collaborative works for the stage, it
was all looking a bit quiet on the theatre front for Morgan. Until
last autumn that is, when Lovesong,
the writer’s first
full-length play to be staged in ten years, opened at the Plymouth
Drum. As 27, another new play by Morgan, opened at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh (directed by Vicki Featherstone), Lovesong embarked on a national tour which brings it to the Lyric Hammersmith for a
three-week run later this month (11 January to 4 February).

The
sad and thoughtful story of a love affair that lasts a lifetime,
Lovesong is
an unusual piece, with two pairs of actors, Leanne
Rowe and Edward Bennett,
and Sam
Cox and Sian Phillips, playing the drama’s central couple at
different periods in their lives. A Frantic Assembly production, the
play features the company’s signature, inimitable style of physical
theatre.

Here
Morgan tells Whatsonstage.com about Lovesong, the
anxiety of
returning
to theatre after such a long time away, and why she’s “keeping her own council” about one day giving directing a go.

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It’s
been ten years since you last worked with Scott Graham and Steven
Hoggett of Frantic Assembly. How did it feel to return to that
collaboration?

We’ve
known each other so long that it does feel like they were very
instrumental in my formative years in terms of writing. They were
part of a whole group of people working together at the same time,
like Vicki Featherstone, who now runs the National Theatre of
Scotland with John Tiffany, Stephen Greenhorn, Mark Ravenhill
and Sarah Cane. Scott and Steven feel very embedded in that period
for me, so it’s been really
interesting coming back working with them again. I’m a little bit
nervous because I find theatre incredibly hard to write. It feels
like it’s something to do with your concentration span, I don’t know
what, but I’ve definitely lost my ability to focus in the same way.

Does
the theatre feel like a familiar and comfortable place because of
your upbringing (Morgan’s mother is the actor Pat England and her
late father was the director Gareth Morgan)?

It
feels very familiar and there are all those old clichés like the
smell of the greasepaint. I think there is a comfort and I really
like actors, I like the energy of them. To a certain degree what’s
great about theatre is that in the beginning you’re very integral to
it and you’re needed and you’re shaping your play. I think it was
Arnold Wesker who said that the playwright directs from the stage
directions. That is the period where you’re really making the work,
but pretty soon, maybe a week or so in, you’re redundant again. So
most of the time it is like giving birth to a baby and then you watch
people adopt it and bring it up in a much better way than you would,
so it’s a very interesting relationship.

Was
it a given that you’d go into theatre, do you think?

From
a very young age, I remember being with my dad when he was drawing
sets with a set designer, and being in green rooms and around costume
departments. It was a very rich world where I realised that
there was a profession in which you tell stories in a very creative,
artistic way and so it was never an option that you couldn’t do that.
But I think if you look at the CVs of some of the great writers of
the last 100 years, most of them their parents never had anything to
do with theatre or television, so actually I don’t think it
matters.

What
motivated you to dedicate Lovesong to your father?

My
father died three years ago. I had quite a complex relationship with
him and it was the first time I’d watched the decline of someone. I
think the play is about mortality and the decline of the self, so in
a way it felt right to dedicate it to him because it felt like it had
come out of that period in my life really.

Unlike
much of your previous work, which has dealt with specific issues,
Lovesong isn’t an ‘issues’ play at all…

No,
not at all. I think I use a very different part of myself when I
write something like Lovesong. I write slightly blind. I write
from a very different place. I sometimes feel I write with just a
sense of a feeling of what a play is going to be, rather than
specifics, and in fact, when I try and break down a play in the way
that I try and break down a piece of film with often a very rigorous
treatment, it falls apart for me, I can’t do it in the same way. It’s
like scoring a piece of music – I kind of have a little bit of a
score in my head and I just start to write it.

You’ve
found acclaim through writing for theatre, television and film. Would
you ever be tempted to give directing a go?

I’m
keeping my council about that at the moment, only because I really
admire the directors I’ve worked with. As a writer I could work every
day in my pyjamas if I wanted to – you can’t really shuffle onto a
set like that. I can just about get my kids’ teeth brushed and get
them off to school and make sure we’ve got something in the fridge
for supper and maybe have the odd conversation with my partner. The
thought of directing…when you put that in the mix…I think you
have to be careful as a writer not to be flattered, not to listen to
your ego. People will always go, ‘you should direct!’ And the truth
is actually whether I’m fit for human consumption in that way,
whether I can do that. I’m not sure.