Women who go to see a Lucy Kirkwood play may find themselves unknowingly serving as production consultants. The dramatist spends a lot of time in the ladies’, not from nerves but because she has found that “you hear really honest responses if you just sit in a cubicle and listen”. At a preview of Chimerica, her epic drama about US-Asia relations, she overheard an Almeida theatregoer say, “Oh God, it’s three hours long. I was hoping to be home for Grand Designs!” It made the writer panic, but the production transferred to the West End and won four best play awards.
Whatever the lavatorial feedback on The Children, about to open at the Royal Court in London, Kirkwood has been unusually thoughtful to her audience with the choice of title. Few were sure how to pronounce Chimerica (the first syllable, she says, should rhyme with whine not him), while no one could remember the name of It Felt Empty When the Heart Went at First But It Is Alright Now, her breakthrough play about sex trafficking.
So is The Children a deliberately simple baptism? “Yes. The Royal Court box office rang me up in tears and pleaded with me,” she jokes. “No. But the first line of the play is, ‘How are the children?’ And so, when it came to the title, I did think, ‘Why not make it easier for the poor bloody people who have to put the play on?’”
Arriving at the Court with long hair blown by the first winds of winter and carrying a big bunch of wild flowers, Kirkwood, 33, looks as if she has come to rehearse for Ophelia’s big scene in Hamlet. The flowers, a gift for her grandmother, were picked at home in Norfolk before she travelled to London for a few days to watch rehearsals for The Children and attend a read-through of another new play, Mosquitoes, which opens in July at the National.
After a success as big as Chimerica, writers often become frozen or panicky about works in progress. “There wasn’t ever a conscious panic about following it,” Kirkwood says. “I’m very grateful that it happened to me relatively late – not that I’m ancient, but it didn’t happen out of the gate. If it happens with a first play, I can understand that causing a panic. But I did notice that I have become quite slow in wanting to finish these two new plays and hand them over.”
There was a time when playwrights with a big success – such as Tom Stoppard and John Osborne – moved to a mansion in the country, but Kirkwood says Chimerica did more for her profile than her purse: “It was a very expensive production. If it had run longer, I might be able to take you out to lunch. So no mansion. But I have a Victorian labourer’s cottage that I’m happy with.”
The fluent rhythm and wit of Kirkwood’s conversation make clear where her characters get their spiky, imagistic dialogue from. Of the first dramas she wrote as a student at Edinburgh University, she says: “I would hesitate to call them plays, but they were definitely dialogue-based lifeforms.” Getting stuck during the composition of a play resembles “trying to put on a wet swimming costume: it won’t go with you”. Seeing actors working on scripts in rehearsal is “like opening your fridge and finding a parmesan rind, and then someone makes you a risotto out of it”.
Key ingredients of both her new plays are female scientists. Mosquitoes features two sisters involved with the Large Hadron Collider experiments in particle physics. In The Children, three nuclear scientists reunite at a teetering seaside cottage after a disaster at a power station. One theme of the latter is parental instinct – choosing to be childless, or having children you can’t love or who don’t love you. This seems to reflect a social phenomenon of the cold war: people choosing not to have children because of fears about the world they would inhabit.
“Yes,” says Kirkwood. “My dad wasn’t going to have children originally for that reason.” Did he tell you? “No, my nana told me. But I did talk to him about it. Along with: would you rather have had a boy? Because there’s just me and my sister. I think those are really interesting questions in families.” She stresses, though, that the sibling relationship in Mosquitoes “definitely isn’t about me and my sister. Although my family always think it’s about them even when it isn’t.”
She grew up on the borders of Essex and London, her father an investment analyst and her mother a signer for deaf students. Her parents’ keen theatregoing seeded her vocation: “The very first time I was interviewed, I said the first play I had ever seen was Alan Bennett’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows at the National. But it got printed as my favourite play, which was pretty devastating for a radical young dramatist. It was brilliant, though. I remember going to school the next day and trying to make a revolving stage.”
Having given up maths and physics at school as soon as she could, Kirkwood is slightly surprised at the current scientific direction of her writing, but she consciously approaches the material as a non-expert. Noting the online speculation that switching on the Large Hadron Collider might cause the end of the world, she wanted Mosquitoes to deal with “the fear of science and how lay people react to science”.
But in the post-apocalyptic scenario of The Children, such concerns seem to have been justified. “Yes. That’s true. Although the play for me was never meant to be an examination of the ins and outs of nuclear power and whether that’s the right way forward.” She sees the older nuclear power stations – built with science and requirements that prove inadequate today – as a wider metaphor for the problems of dealing with social and political inheritances.
Across her first decade as a playwright, Kirkwood’s work displays trademarks of strong narrative – “I came to realise that Chimerica is really a thriller” – and, in common with the work of her theatrical heroine Caryl Churchill, an intense attempt to approximate on stage the way people really speak. Kirkwood’s characters get speeches containing sudden gaps, stammering repeats or switchbacks that give a delayed answer to an earlier question.
She points out that the versions of her answers that appear in this piece will have been purged of the mistakes, false trails and hesitations, with the result that her theory of dialogue now reads: “Very few people in life speak aloud in spontaneous perfectly formed certainties – and I’m suspicious of those who do – and so to me dialogue without hesitations, overlaps, repetitions, loops and mistakes draws attention to its ‘written-ness’. It’s a bit like how in a good costume department they don’t just give an actor a coat, they age and weather and scuff up and dirty the coat until it feels like the character has actually worn it. Because a new coat on stage jumps out a mile.”
Her first five performed plays – from 2008’s Tinderbox, a 21st-century dystopia, to Chimerica – are published this month in an anthology, and the playwright found it agonising to revisit the scripts: “It’s like reading a teenage diary. You’re mortified by what you were like. Anything of mine I read from the past I find excruciating. I was itching to rewrite, but I had to be very strict with myself. You have to be honest about the writer you were at the time.”
Between the opening of The Children and rehearsals for Mosquitoes, she hopes to complete a four-part drama, potentially for Channel 4, that extends Chimerica’s investigation of contemporary politics; it’s set during the year of the Brexit and Trump victories. “The whole of democracy looks fragile and farcical. After writing about communist China in Chimerica, you suddenly look at western democracy and think: is this necessarily better? Maybe this is the endgame.”
• The Children is at the Royal Court, London, from 17 November until 14 January. Mosquitoes opens at the National Theatre in July.
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