The Observer
04.08.19 11millionaire money managers.
Enron began as a great success
story for her. Rupert Goold ’s
production gained fi ve-star critical
acclaim and transferred for a sell-
out season in the W est E nd that
made it seem a nailed-on hit for
Broadway. In fact, however, after
lukewarm previews and hostile
reviews , the major New York
production closed after only 10 days.
That must have come as a shock?
“Shock implies I was expecting
it to go well,” she says, with a quick
laugh. “And as my family would
tell you, I don’t approach life like
that. I wish I did. But it wasn’t
just a critical mauling over there;
audiences didn’t like it.”
She is not completely sure
why. It would be too easy, she
insists, to say that the Americans
didn’t want a clever young British
woman exposing and ridiculing
the corruption of Wall Street.
“Hamilton is the perfect American
show,” she says. “The struggle and
the optimism and the triumph.
It’s brilliant. But I have a bleaker
sensibility. For some people my
plays can feel like being hit over the
head with information all the time.”
Prebble wrote another play, The
Effect , based on the clinical trial for a
new anti-depressant, which among
other things questioned whether
emotion manipulated by chemicals
was for real. After that there has
been a seven-year gap until the
Litvinenko play. Why was that?
“Honestly?” Prebble says. “The
truth is I had a really rough few
years personally. I think I had a bit
of a breakdown, looking back. I only
use that word because that is exactly
what it felt like.”
She doesn’t want to go into theThe Secret Diary of a Call Girl – a
diffi cult TV baptism for both of
them. Piper also later starred in
The Effect.
Speaking later about her
friendship with Prebble, Piper
agrees with the playwright’s
suggestion that they are mutual
muses as well as mates. “As much
as I love Lucy as a person and care
about her emotionally I am also
really interested in her,” Piper told
me. “She fascinates me as a woman.”
Some of that fascination comes
from watching Prebble work. “It’s
funny,” Piper says. “Lucy starts with
really big themes. With The Effect it
was about a drug trial and whether
love was real or a placebo itself. A
really big bold intellectual idea, but
then she fi nds the human story in it.”
For a time, when Prebble was
struggling, the pair of them “were
constantly on the phone handling
each other’s emotional stuff.” Piper
had been on at her friend for years
to work together again on TV “but
the experience was so traumatic the
fi rst time around that it has taken
this long to get back on board”.
The pair have been working on
something for about three years that
is fi nally going into production in
the autumn.
What is the story?
“It is about two women in their
30s and how different that looks to
being a woman in your 20s,” Piper
says. “We’ve both been through
our fair share of crisis and we want
to see if we can speak a bit for our
generation. Or at least that’s the
plan.... ”
It took Prebble a while to get
herself back to the point where she
was sure she had something to say.
As well as friendships there were a
couple of professional experiences
that helped her to regain her
writer’s voice. The fi rst was
accepting an offer to work on a
video game called, appropriately
enough, Destiny, out in Seattle.
Prebble went over to help
them with their storytelling.
She found the experience
of playing a bit part to
animators and designers “very
comforting; also there was a
child version of myself who
was in love with video games”.T
he second thing
that helped
to restore her
confi dence was
the HBO series
Succession. Jesse
Armstrong’s compulsive dynastic
drama, which chronicles the comic
machinations of a billionaire media
family (with echoes of the Murdochs
and the Redstones ) evolved into a
box-set King Lear.
Prebble was initially approached
to work on it by her American agent.
“They said ‘do you want to be a
writer in the room?’” she recalls –
no longer the lead. “So I went in at
a little bit of a low ebb – but it was
just the most life-changing, brilliant
environment. That self-protective
thing that can be common in theatre- ‘don’t mess with my words!’ –
wasn’t there. All these brilliant
comic writers would say, ‘I’ve
written this but it’s a bit shit, can
you help?’ I’d never had that before
but it was like coming home.”
Armstrong, the show’s British
creator, concurs: “Lucy is a dream
collaborator. In a writing room
you need to invest in the new
idea totally, but then be prepared
to disregard it brutally. She has a
mixture of worldly omnivorous
intelligence mixed with come-
on-let’s fi x-this-enthusiasm.
Also, funny.”
Prebble suggests she emerged
from the team experience of
writing the fi rst series “almost as if
I had been rebuilt”. Season two of
Succession airs on 12 August ; she
has just fi nished work on the fi nal
episode.
Prebble found another strand
of conviction on social media. She
has long been a caustic Twitterer.
“I withdrew to social media for a
while,” she says. “As someone very
invested in games and tech as a kid,
I felt like I was reminding myself
of what sort of stuff I would say if I
could say anything.”
She has, she says, tried to bring
all of that spirit to her play. Without
wanting to sound too grand, she
suggests that it feels like a political
moment to stand up and be
counted. “I don’t want to look back
later in life and think: ‘what was I
doing then?’” she says.
At the end of her play, she turns
that challenge back to her audience.
Much of the artifi ce that drives
the play dissolves and the Marina
Litvinenko character engages
directly with the theatregoers.
“There was a time when my
absolute nightmare would have
been some actor coming up and
talking to me in the audience,”
Prebble says. “As I’ve got older,
and I’ve been through lots of life
experiences and done therapy I
realise that those kinds of fears are
not healthy. Not allowing yourself
to take part and be vulnerable isn’t
good for you.”
You mean people should think
about being actors as well as
spectators in our current politics?
“Exactly. So at the end of this- and it sounds wanky obviously
- I wanted to make the point
that we are all a bit responsible
for the society we have created.
‘Oh dearism’ – that refrain that
everything is bad and none of it is
our fault – that is exactly what those
in power want.”
She laughs, talks about some
of the anxieties of dramatising
those concerns with 25 actors. “The
fact is,” she says, returning to the
rehearsal room in her head, “This is
a risky, clumsy motherfucker, this
play. If it goes down in fl ames, it
goes down in fl ames. But,” she says,
“I really think it is the right thing
for now.”
A Very Expensive Poison runs at the
Old Vic , London SE1, from 20 August
until 5 October. Lucy Prebble, Marina
Litvinenko and Luke Harding will
discuss the poisoning at a Guardian
Live event at Kings Place, London
on 2 September. Book tickets at
membership.theguardian.comspecifi cs (“it ’s not just my story”)
except to say “I had a lot of loss
in my life in a very short period”.
The result was that she became
somewhat paralysed creatively.
“I thought depression was about
smashing things up, or staying in
bed all the time,” she says. “But for
me it was this kind of impossibility
of making even the smallest
decisions. It felt like there was no
centre from which I was acting. I
lost a lot of confi dence.”
She found it harder and harder
to write. She did a pilot for an
HBO series starring Sarah
Silverman , “someone I really
admire and love”. HBO dropped
it. “Everyone was looking to me
to be the American idea of the
showrunner,” she says, “and I
was at my least confi dent at that
point.”
What was the HBO story about?
“It was a show about a woman
who works in the computer-
games industry and falls in
love with a guy and moves
to London to be with him.
And fi nds herself being a
stepmother to his kids and
hating it. It was supposed to be
funny but it came out bleak.”
As a result of that Prebble
“had that bad feeling that I’d
had a great opportunity and
squandered it and felt the shame
of that.” There were other ideas
that she tried to write but which
didn’t get a good reaction and were
immediately abandoned.
A few things helped her through
that period, she says. One was
friendship. She talks very warmly
about her closeness to Billie Piper ,
the actress with whom she fi rst
worked on the ITV adaptation ofBELOW
Mutual muses
and mates: Lucy
Prebble with
Billie Piper.РЕЛИЗ
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