Abi Morgan

0:00Hello, I'm John Wilson. You're about to listen to This Cultural Life. Episodes are released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episode first on BBC Sounds, seven days earlier than anywhere else. Do subscribe to This Cultural Life on BBC Sounds and make sure you have push notifications turned on and we'll let you know as soon as new episodes are available.

0:29Hello and welcome back to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures discuss the influences and experiences that have shaped their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the screenwriter and playwright Abby Morgan. Working across a diverse array of themes and genres, she wrote the legal series The Split and created the psychological Netflix drama Eric. Her other television credits include Sex Traffic, for which she won a BAFTA for Best Drama Serial in 2005, and The Hour, the television news drama which earned her an Emmy Award in 2012. Her film credits include The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, Suffragette and Shame, co-written with the director Steve McQueen.

1:13Her work for theatre includes the play Splendour and The Mistress Contract. Abby Morgan's recent book This Is Not a Pity Memoir recounts her husband's recovery after serious illness and her own treatment for cancer. Abby Morgan, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you for having me. You were born in Cardiff in 1968 to two theatrical parents. Your father, Gareth Morgan, was a theatre director and your mother, Pat England, is an actress. Are your earliest memories all bound up with the theatre? You know, one of my earliest memories is the scratch of a red theatre seat. You know, those old, that kind of scratchy, almost like velvet, but not theatre seat.

1:56I remember the feeling of it on my cheek. And I think genuinely as whimsical as this sounds, probably my earliest memory is being shoved at the back of a theatre somewhere to sleep. So I think I must have been incredibly young. I mean, my father ran theatres till I was about 10 years old. And so I think my earliest memories are definitely about the sense of being on a set. There's not many spaces where you come into where there's a kind of hole, a void in the room, but there's something about an auditorium and that space of coming in and knowing that somewhere on that space were my parents. But you're talking about an empty auditorium, which suggests, and also the feeling of that seat so you're asleep, you're in rehearsals all the time.

2:36Yeah, very much so. I think it was probably the only way that my father would ever see us. And also my mother was an actress as well, so I think about my mother often, who was still working at the age of 86, and I think it was such a different time there. So when my father was working, his career dominated. And so in many ways, I think my mother used to bring us to the rehearsal room just so he could be reminded he had children. But also, I think for her as an actress, it was a way to be part of that space, even when she was raising children, that she couldn't act herself. And your early years spent in Newcastle, because your father was running the Gulbenkian Theatre, which is now known as Northern Stage.

3:09Yeah. Did you do any child acting for him? Yeah, absolutely. You were roped in? Yeah, roped in all the time. I remember being in a production of Comus, which is when I started to first understand my neurodiversity because I couldn't tell my left from my right in a lot of the kind of medieval dances we were doing. He was doing a big production of Milton's epic play as a stage player. And my brother and my sister and I were all roped in to do the dancing and the movement. And in fact, we had a nanny who was looking after us, Francis Timelty, who at the time was married to Sting. And he was in the theatre band at the time.

3:43She just had her son. And so it was always an environment. They had children around him. And Sting was in the house band. Yeah, he was in the house band. I mean, I'd love to think I had a memory of him. I don't think I have. Your parents split up when I think you were about 12 years old. What impact did that have on you at the time, do you think? I think it was very profound. I think anybody who comes from that kind of point of catalyst, however it is dealt with, it touches you in some ways. I think actually if you look at most of my work, it's threaded in there somewhere. But I presume also at that time your mother becomes a single parent but is also a working actor and is having to chase the work wherever it may be.

4:20Absolutely. So were you moving around? I think we'd always moved around. I went to seven, eight schools as I was growing up. And if you're an actress, you know, it's a rare thing now, but at that time my mother was kind of saved by Peter Cheeseman, who was running the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trant at the time, who offered my mother a job in the rep company, and she was there for five years, solidly. Did you have any ambitions to act at that age? I was a truly terrible actress, and I knew it really early on, but I had the kind of ultimate humiliation, which is in my second year at university.

4:51I invited my mum and my sister to see me in a production of Ubu Rua. And I remember afterwards going, so what do you think? And they were like, no, darling, no, absolutely not. And I knew, you know, my heart of heart, I didn't really like that sense of being looked at. And also I realised very early on that actors were kind of inanimate if they didn't have a job. It's not something you can do on your own, you need an audience, whereas the discovery with writing is I could do that anywhere without anyone in the room, and I've had this sense of forward momentum. I could create even if nobody was paying me to create.

5:22I could do something.

5:28On This Cultural Life, Abby Morgan, my guests choose the most significant influences that have shaped their own creativity. And your first choice for this programme is the writer, director and journalist Nora Ephron, best known, of course, for her scripts for the films Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and, of course, her novel Heartburn, which she also adapted as a film. How did you first come across the work of Nora Ephron? I think I remember seeing her name on the credits when I watched Heartburn. In a way, the marriage of her voice, which obviously is East Coast, is very different from the world I grew up in.

6:06There were similarities for me. It had a wit and it had a humour, but there was also a kind of exposure of the soul and the heart, and yet it's always very commercial, her work. So a lot of those kind of rom-coms that she created... I mean, you know, we're talking about darker, I suppose in terms of something like heartburn but if you move through into When Harry Met Sally Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail it was the fact she was also a polymath she wasn't just a writer she'd originated I think in journalism but she became a director and I was looking for those role models really and I just find her work so witty and so I sort of have chased her work subsequently Go on Sam, I'm listening Look, it's Christmas Maggie my wife she made everything beautiful it's just tough this time of year any kid needs a mother could it be that you need someone just as much as Jonah does don't answer that if you've just tuned in we're talking to Sleepless in Seattle and we'll be right back after this break I guess what I love about her is that even at the most painful moments there was so much humour and comedy to her work.

7:17I think she famously said, all writers are cannibals. And I love that declaration of such an obvious truth, really, which is that she could see the humour in everything, but it's always very heart-based. And I guess that's what I tried to do with The Split. The Split came out of a meeting with a female divorce lawyer at my kid's school. And I realised within the hour of standing by a hockey pitch that there was a great show here. But actually what I really realised was that there were these very human stories that felt incredibly relatable. They related to the conversations I'd had with my friends, with the people I love the most, with my own partner.

7:49Divorce is a process of redrawing all the boundaries. Emotionally, psychologically, economically. I've heard it described as open heart surgery. Whilst you're still awake, with no reassurances that everything will be put back in the right place. I am not saying this to alarm you, but I want you to be clear. Leaving any marriage is frightening. You've built a life around a person, and when that breaks down... I'm not frightened of leaving. It's staying that I can't stomach anymore. Were you also drawing on your experience of divorce as a child, seeing your parents' splitter? Yeah, 100%. You know, the split, I was always kind of exploring the idea of a literal split, but also I wanted to look at the internal split that creates in yourself, and the splits that we have within ourselves, which is that we can love someone, but we can desire another, can have huge ambition for ourself, but actually feel in conflict when we see it in others.

8:47So I was always looking at the kind of split within relationships but within the self. Heartburn was your entry to Nora Ephron. Is there any particular scene in that that particularly inspired you? Well, I guess, you know, I think Nora, I mean, particularly that's an autobiographical book, and there's the great scene with the flan scene where she smashes the flan into his face, and I think any child who's ever come from a divorced family, has either witnessed that or wanted to see the pie in the face. And the dream breaks into a million tiny little pieces, which leaves you with a choice. You can either stick with it, which is unbearable, or you can just go off and dream another dream.

9:29I think she takes you through the most excruciating, funny, painful moments, so I guess that's the one that stands out. But also that feeling of a woman falling apart and her mind unravelling and how she builds herself back up again. I'm very drawn to that. You and Nora Ephron also have Meryl Streep in common, of course, because Meryl Streep starred in Silkwood in Heartburn and later on in Julie and Julia. And she starred as Margaret Thatcher in your script for The Iron Lady and also was Emmeline Pankhurst in Suffragette. So I've got to get her in one more film. I hope she listens to this, Meryl.

10:02I'm coming for her. Still, it must be a bit disorientating. You're bound to be feeling. What? What am I bound to be feeling? People don't think anymore. They feel. How are you feeling? Oh, I don't feel comfortable. Oh, I'm so sorry. We, the group, were feeling. Do you know, one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas. Now, thoughts and ideas. That interests me. She's still, for me, the greatest actress around, and so I feel so grateful that I got to meet Meryl because I never got to meet Nora Ephron. I remember hearing when Nora died, I mean, I'm talking during the first person, but she wrote so brilliantly about her life and her books and she wrote so brilliantly about ageing and there was something very elegant about it.

10:58There was goofball and elegance and those two things are pretty hard to muster. I think the older you get, You're looking for women who've laid down track. And she stopped at 71 and I wanted to see her at 75 and 80 and I just wanted more of her. Nora Ephron's mantra was everything is copy, something that she'd learnt from her mother who was a journalist as well, meaning everything in your life is there to be used in your writing. Your work is usually about other people, but of course in 2022 you wrote about yourself and your family in incredibly candid detail. in the book This Is Not A Pity Memoir.

11:34For those who haven't read the book, just tell us about those terrifying sequence of events and experiences that you describe in the book. Well, the book was triggered by the collapse of my husband in 2018 from a brain seizure that was later revealed as a very rare form of encephalitis. And the book really tracks from 2018 to about sort of mid-2021, where Jacob was put into an induced coma for eight months and when he came out of that coma, he really had to learn how to live again. But what was key to that experience was that when he woke up, the kind of most archetypal plot twist happened, which is he remembered everybody but me.

12:13He developed a very rare delusion called Capgras delusion. And within that delusion, it was the belief in imposters and doubles and I was an imposter. And so we spent the first two years of Jacob's return and rehabilitation in a kind of house of carers and therapists and two teenage children who were on the edge of being ready to fly, we spent this period with his belief that I was being employed by the government to look after him. And it sounds crazy and mad, but through that I also sadly developed breast cancer. And as tragic and as difficult as that was, it became the kind of lifeline to us finding each other again because he started to appreciate and realise that this woman who he believed was caring for him, he also felt a profound amount of feeling for, and in feeling that feeling again, we reconnected.

12:58And so the book kind of captures this very difficult period through the kind of prism of a screenwriter. Hello, emergency, which service do you need? I need an ambulance. My husband, partner, husband, he's collapsed. Is your husband breathing? He's not my husband. He's my... We live together, and what's his name? For a minute, I go blank. This is the man I love, the man I have known for nearly 20 years, the man who I have fought with and laughed with and loved with, the man who is never going to be the same again. It begins with Jay. Jacob. It is an incredibly moving book. It's terrifying, the experience to read about that as well.

13:40But there is a deadpan quality to a lot of the writing. I mean, Jacob, your husband, not knowing who this person is, who is living with him, but also being aware that he doesn't want to upset the writer Abbey Morgan, who he knows he had a relationship with and can't associate you, this person next to him, with the writer Abbey Morgan. Yeah, very perverse. Was humour an emotional safety valve for you? Yeah, and humour is absolutely threaded in the heart of my relationship with Jacob. He's one of the wittiest intelligent men I know and that had always been there and in fact it was the first thing that started to come back there were probably two loves that Jacob and I have one is food and the other is comedy and humour and I guess the third for him would be Tottenham Hotspur but I don't quite share that but I think the humour that's found in the midst of tragedy is not only a valve to release the pressure but it becomes essential and I don't underestimate to go back to the Nora F front line which is we're cannibals, you know, writers are cannibals and however painful it was I was acutely aware that this was the most brilliant, terrifying, challenging, intoxicating story.

14:47And I'm really aware of when you were describing the story a few moments ago, and you said it was like a plot twist. So you saw it immediately as almost like a scene in a drama. Did you think at that point, I'm going to have to write about this? Yeah, I knew I was going to write about it from day one. The day that Jake collapsed, I started to write a diary, which was a conversation with him. So it started with you. you know you collapsed today you and the book oscillates between my direct conversation with Jacob and then you know switching back into the first person the me and then seeing him in the third person so I'm constantly shifting a little bit like a camera woman in the middle of it I'm shifting the perspective on it throughout but I yeah I definitely was I mean everything was written in dialogue and also it was an incredibly adrenalized heightened period in my life so I remember things like you know it's something I've noticed when I have been writing too much or I'm chasing a deadline is that everything I hear feels like dialogue and I'm constantly editing.

15:42So even the Amazon guy would come to the door and I'd think, you've used way too many words to tell me that you've left the parcel in the bin shed. Does that happen just in moments of pressure, almost as if you're hitting a deadline, or is that just the way you look at the world all the time? It's particular when I'm chasing a deadline or when I'm working on something that's very difficult. I often dream in sequences and scenes and I wake up going, final scene, third act, how's it going to work? And so that kind of prism was the way I viewed what was happening with Jacob. And I now see it's also a trauma response, actually, if I'm honest.

16:13I think from a very early age, I learned that narrative would save you. Narrative was the way to entertain. Narrative was the way to embody and hold an experience. You know, I was watching plays from such a young age, plays that I was so bored and often falling asleep on in the back. Everything from Chekhov to Shakespeare to, you know, several hours of David Rudkin through to modern plays. You know, I've watched my mother regularly in Rep. And so storytelling and knowing how to take something that was real and convert that into something that someone will listen to, that was absolutely the heart of the deal with the devil that I was doing all the time when Jacob got ill.

16:49I can understand how creating dialogue from these situations may be a way of dealing personally for you to make sense of the situation. But do you have any regrets looking back, having written everything down, having exposed what Jacob was going through? and your children as well, to such scrutiny. Yeah, I remember my daughter turning around and saying, are you all right if people don't like you after this, Mama? And I thought about that. I think my children obviously were the most important thing, and Jacob. Interestingly, Jacob's never read the book. He's now thankfully very much recovered and could, but he chooses not to, and I think he's the person I've always been concerned about, probably the most.

17:29Do I regret it? I think I would regret anything that hurt anyone, So I guess I shared the book very closely with my family and Jacob's family, and I asked them all to read it before it went out there. But fundamentally, I think back to Sarah Kane, the playwright, who I knew on a professional level before her untimely demise. And I always remember her saying, if you say I can't write it, then you say it can't exist. And I think there's something really profound in that for me, which is it's only words. and I want my children to know that they can speak freely, even about the most painful things, even about the hardest things.

18:06But your point about dialogue, you know, it's not necessarily even creating dialogue. It's often kind of going, God, that dialogue's better than anything I could write. Do you write stuff down as you're walking, sitting on the tube on the bus? I always remember, I think David Hare said, what needs to sticks. And so, yeah, I write little bits. I record more than anything. I mean, I don't record people, but I record myself saying back certain lines. So I do a little bit of that and I keep notes on my phone. I don't do epic amounts of notes because I kind of think it will filter down what I need to keep.

18:33Why has Jacob not wanted to read it? Has he told you why he's avoiding it? In a way, I guess, because in some ways, if anything, it's probably unsettling that everybody knows so much about him, you know, before he's walked into the room. And I wrangle a lot with that in the book, which is, is it my story, is it his story? And what he would say is, it's your story. It's your story, and I'll read it one day, but it's your story of it. I think that's the biggest thing for Jacob, is that he remembers so little of it. And did it help you make sense of what you went through? Was it cathartic in that way?

19:03It was immensely cathartic. It was essential. And I think the reality of knowing that I had those skills, that all of those years of writing, often rubbish, late into the night actually paid off because when the very worst thing happened to me, I wrote myself through the experience. I made something of it. And, I mean, you know, the plan is to turn it to something on the screen. And I think if I'm really doing that for anybody, I'm probably doing it to continue my conversation with Jacob. He physically is much better now and mentally. And how are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. I mean, I definitely feel like I've dodged a bullet.

19:41So I'm feeling really grateful to be here. And I know people print those platitudes on T-shirts, but I do genuinely feel acutely aware of my mortality. I think what you're looking at is a woman who's clawed herself up from the floor and I can see it, whether I like it or not, I mean I can see it People often say to me, like on the way here the woman very sweetly said I don't mean to be rude but are you okay with stairs? And I felt like going, oh my god, I'm 56, please let me be okay with stairs But the truth of the fact is I'm an imprint My body and my face and my hair and everything that's been left I think you can feel it and I can see the crack in me I guess that was why I wrote the book.

20:20It's sort of been what saved me.

20:30Your next choice for This Cultural Life, Abby Morgan, is the work of a fellow television dramatist, Kay Mellor, best known for the dramas Band of Gold, about the sex workers in Bradford, or playing the field about a women's football team. What was your introduction to the work of Kay Mellor? Probably Band of Gold, actually, which was sort of, I think, early, mid-'90s. I was just coming out of university and there was this incredible show, Samantha Morton, Geraldine James, Cathy Tyson. It was about an ensemble of women and they felt like real voices. And this is my patch. What's going on? She wants to work the lane.

21:09As if I didn't know. It's written right across your face, love. Well, nobody works this lane without my permission. You want to work the lay and you ask me. I'm asking. Kay was from Leeds. She came up through Coronation Street and... Brookside as well. And Brookside. My mother used to go out with an actor from Brookside, so I remember, you know, watching Brookside forever and looking for the female writers on the credits. You would look for the credits, would you? Yeah, I'd always look at the credits for where the women were. From a very, very... I remember that really early on. My mum used to watch this kind of late-night BBC Lily.

21:40There was a TV show about Lily Langtree and I must have been incredibly young. I was five or six. And I remember watching that and going, oh my God, a woman's in the lead. And I think that's also related to the fact that my mum was an actress. And so whenever I write, I'm always writing parts for my mother. I hate writing small parts. I'd rather not write a line for an actor if they're only going to have one line. I'd rather just use an extra because I just don't like the idea of actors having to sit around. I've now discovered that there are some actors who love it if they've only got one scene in a TV show or in a stage play.

22:13But the thing with Kay, to go back to that, was that there were these ballsy, brilliant women who were very witty, but they were talking about really painful stuff. And they were dealing with something that was political with a quiet pee, which is the politics of sex and sex work. And that felt very profound. And I like shows that have ensembles of women. The reason why I write for ensembles of women is really simple. It's that, yes, I love women and I love writing for them, but I also want to build the business for them. There have been ensembles of men for centuries, you know, within theatre, but also within filmmaking, you know, the ensembles of the mob or the ensembles of a syndicate, the ensembles of business, where you've seen millions of men in suits, which has meant that an actor coming up could be the third lead, then the second lead, then the lead.

22:59And so what I love is creating ensembles of women that will give actors jobs, which will give an unknown the third lead or the fourth lead, which means that they will build their currency because they're seen and someone will say, God, I loved her in that, we should get her in. But also, as you say there, the ensemble idea of the women working together, but very often there is a character in your drama, the woman, who is battling against the male-dominated institution, whether that's suffragette or whether it's Mrs Thatcher in The Iron Lady. So that is a recurring trope of your work, that you're conscious of.

23:33Yeah, 100%. I mean, I grew up through the 70s into the 80s. I mean, the kind of passive sexism. And a lot of those structures are very patriarchal. You know, this idea of a collective, this idea where people shared power, which is what I saw amongst ensembles of women, felt really interesting to me. And what Kay Mellor was often doing was bringing working-class women together. Working-class women, and again, I think the class thing is a really important element, which is, you know, Thatcher always said a bigger obstacle to her rise to power in government was not her sex, but her class. And, you know, classes are really different.

24:03I grew up in working-class communities. You are sort of always in a permanent middle class if you grew up in the arts, even if you're broke. You're seen as being part of the elite, certainly in a working-class community as well. Was that difficult for you, though? Growing up in Newcastle, I spoke on Trent and having two theatrical... Yeah, it was always other. I mean, I remember when I came to Stoke-on-Trent in the early 80s and a girl came to my house and she wasn't allowed to come to my house again because she told her mother that she saw a birth control pill in the bathroom. And my mother was an actress and not married, so what did she need a birth control pill for?

24:38Even in the early 80s where there was this prejudice against actresses, I mean, it goes right the way back to Nell Gwynn. I mean, it was ridiculous. So there was a kind of idea that there was something glamorous and other about it, but it really, you know, if anybody who's grown up in the arts know, it's feast and famine. Were you regarded as posh by the other kids? Oh, always. Because I grew up with a mother who lost her accent, her Welsh accent through elocution lessons and drama school in the late 50s, early 60s RP. But you identified with that sense of community, amidst adversity and those K melodramas?