Lucy Prebble

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0:10Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading creative people reveal the formative influences and experiences that inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the playwright and television dramatist Lucy Preble. Renowned for tackling big themes on stage, Lucy made her name as a playwright still only in her mid-twenties when she wrote the hugely successful Enron. The play, which premiered in 2009 and explored the collapse of the American Energy Corporation eight years earlier, transferred to the West End and also played on Broadway. In 2019, she premiered A Very Expensive Poison, which dramatised the assassination in London of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.

0:53Lucy Preble has also written for television. She devised and wrote the black comedy series I Hate Susie with its star Billy Piper. She was also one of the writers of the Emmy, Golden Globe and BAFTA winning Succession, about the ageing media mogul deciding if and how to hand control of his corporate empire to his children. Lucy Preble, welcome to This Cultural Life. Hi John, great to be here. You've written for theatre, for television, for video games even. Take us back to childhood in Surrey. Were you always writing as a child? Never showed it to anybody. Never showed anybody a piece of writing of mine until probably I was at university in my 20s.

1:32But before that, there was a lot of shoeboxes under the bed. So there's a lot of diaries, short stories, bad poetry, usual sort of thing. There's also what you would call now fan fiction, like versions of TV shows that I liked as a kid that I'd sort of started to try and write versions of. Oh, what were you watching as a kid? I was watching a lot of American sitcoms. I remember very clearly I used to, on cassette, record episodes of Golden Girls, of Star Trek, of stuff like that. And then I would take that to bed, plug it in next to me and listen to them as I was going to sleep. So there was something in the shape and the structure and the rhythms, particularly of sitcom, that I think I found really comforting.

2:12So it was the dialogue of television programmes that you're interested in rather than the visuals? Well, absolutely. Or possibly also that was available to me. That's the thing that I could have in my bedroom and listen to. and I think that did deeply sort of infiltrate me. Yeah, the sound of dialogue, the rhythm of it. Yeah, and I remember just sort of falling asleep to that and finding it deeply comforting. Were you encouraged to write and by whom at an early age? Actually, no. It was a very private experience for me, deliberately so. So perhaps nobody even knew I was doing it. I think there was something that was able to be expressed and explored in writing that was emotionally helpful for me.

2:52but very personally and the last thing I wanted at that stage in my life was for people to see it and read it because it felt very exposing and private. Was it a bookish house? You say you were reading a lot as a child but does that mean there was a big library at home? Oh yeah, every single room had books in it. My mum has always been a massive believer in that, that old thing of a room without books is like a body without a soul. Was she a teacher? She was a secretary and bursar at various state schools. She was very bookish herself as a kid and used to get told off for it. You know, going on beach holidays to West Wittering and being told like, why are you inside reading a book?

3:27We've come to the beach. And she's like, I'm not interested in the beach. And I really relate to that. So there were a lot of books in the house. And you studied English at university, I think, didn't you? I did at Sheffield. And carried on, I presume, carried on writing when you were there for yourself. Yeah and then there was a very big gear change which was there were some people there who really wanted to act. There was the National Student Drama Festival which is kind of a very small festival, a little bit like a tiny version of the Edinburgh Festival but for students. And they were looking to take a play to it and I said you know I write.

4:05I hadn't ever really said that before and they said oh okay well you write us something. and so I sort of threw myself into that and it was a mess what I wrote but I'll tell you what actually did work was the dialogue the dialogue felt real when they said it or okay and the shape of the play was a mess but there was something in it it was about a group of management consultants who had just left university and had joined a big consulting firm and I guess I guess a little bit like a sort of not very good version of industry or something. And it was sort of about a bunch of people abandoning their principles, but it was all very messy and not very well shaped.

4:45But it was young people with dialogue in a world that I was clearly interested in. Isn't it interesting that a writer best known for Enron and for Succession, her very first play was about betrayal of principles within the context of corporate life? I suppose so. Yeah, it sounds ever so worthy when you put it like that.

5:07The first significant moment that you've chosen for this cultural life is working as a temp assistant in the Director's Office of the National Theatre in 2003, and the new director at the time, the incoming director, was Nicholas Heitner. Did you have any ambitions at that time to work in theatre when you got the job, or was it just a job? I was definitely trying to look towards the arts at that point. Previous to that, after graduating, I had done a lot of temping secretarial, so that's kind of what I was looking at and I just applied to this assistant to an assistant job at the National and ended up getting it and I didn't realise what a big deal that was I didn't realise what a huge turning point that was going to be this new regime at the National Nick Heitner comes in and I happened to be sat in this office it felt like suddenly being on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise you know you're a very lowly ensign but you can see how it's working and what's going on.

6:03And it was this extraordinary first season where a large number of shows, which obviously I got to see for free, I was just in the theatre, I was just standing at the back, and it really gave me access to a world that I would never have had access to before. What did the job entail? Basically organising a diary. For Heitner? For Heitner, yeah. I mean, really, his actual assistant did most of that, bringing teas and coffees into meetings, maybe lingering slightly longer in the meetings than I should have done, and typing letters. I opened all of the posts that came to the National for Nick, which was very interesting in that season, and I would type letters as he dictated them, and I would do filing.

6:46So it was a very administrative job, but it was a very open space. Heighton very deliberately wanted it to feel like a more inclusive space. I think we took down walls, literally, and opened up the office. And there were many, many occasions where a certain writer would come in on their press night. I remember when His Girl Friday opened that John Guare wrote with Jack O 'Brien directing. And they turned up with a takeaway in the director's office on the press night and said, we never watch press night, we can't. We just write bad reviews in our head. And they sat at my desk as I was working and ate the takeaway and talked to me about theatre, which was a pretty special experience.

7:20What were the standout productions that you saw then? Gerry's Bring in the Opera had a huge effect on me. I'd never seen anything that felt contemporary in that way in the theatre. I associated theatre with Shakespeare or old musicals and the idea that it was something about now and that was so lurid and yet also emotionally beautiful. Tonight, all my guests have guilty secrets. So, Dwight, what's your story? I've been seeing someone else I've been seeing someone else And I'd just never seen anything like that before, and I remember thinking, oh, if it can be like this, I would want to do this.

8:01What effect did seeing all of those plays in a short space of time, at the top level in the National Theatre, what effect did that have on your creative imagination, do you think? Well, yeah, it was hugely inspiring. But I think why I was particularly fortunate was that I wasn't just seeing the end product. I think sometimes when you see something at its most evolved point, you just experience it as brilliant and you think, well, I could never do that. And I think being around people as they're making something, I saw a lot of people freaking out as well. A lot of people coming up to the director's office and going, I can't do this anymore.

8:39It's a disaster. And actually, I said we should have been on in this theatre, not that one. And, you know, you just see all of that and the friction and the tension and the doubt, the tremendous doubt of making anything. And, of course, all of the early drafts were on Nick's desk as well of plays that hadn't yet been on. And I would, you know, quietly read those. And I shouldn't have done that, but I did. And actually reading stuff by really amazing legendary writers that is an early draft was more inspiring in a way than seeing its final form. because you start to feel like, I could imagine myself doing this, like doing something that's not good yet.

9:19And that's such a key to writing, is just allowing yourself to be not good yet. That's an extraordinary insight into the working mechanisms of theatre, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, how fortunate was I? And in that same year, 2003, you did stage your debut, your first full-length play, The Sugar Syndrome, which was at the Royal Court Theatre, upstairs at the Royal Court. So I presume you were writing that whilst doing the day job as well. That's right. And in fact, often when I was there at night at the National, that's what I was doing. I was writing on the computer there. And Sugar Syndrome was about a relationship between a teenage girl who has an eating disorder and an older man, a paedophile, and that relationship which is sort of fostered and nurtured online.

10:01You were 22, I think, weren't you, at this time when you wrote it. What inspired that play? Do you remember, I mean, this was just before The Sun did all of that outing of child abusers on its front page and it felt like a very febrile area that now I think there's been a lot about but then it didn't feel like there had been. For me, she has an eating disorder and there was something about her relationship with food that was extremely unhealthy and toxic and maybe a male relationship with sex that was extremely illegal and immoral and toxic and horrible that I was interested in for some reason.

10:38But I think personally it went back to being a kid who was very obsessed with the Internet when it first happened. I spent a lot of time online in the early days of things like the AOL chat rooms and the MSN chat rooms, because when I was kind of coming of age was exactly when the Internet was coming of age as well. I was always fascinated by that dark space online, that place where people who had fake names would interact with each other. and I certainly spoke to a lot of people just textually online where I was like, well, this could be a kid messing about or it could be a very, very troubled, dangerous adult.

11:18A predator. Yeah, and I had conversations where I thought, I've no idea which one this is and that just felt like such a new experience and I just, you know, like all of us at the time, I suppose, who were engaging with it, knew that there was something massive there. It's a brilliant idea that this play, A Debut, which is staged upstairs at the Royal Court, A Tiny Space, was written at the National Theatre. Did Nicholas Height, the director, know that you were writing? Did he know about your ambitions? And did he encourage you? Yeah, there was a lot of encouragement generally throughout the play.

11:52So I remember when I made the decision that I wanted to leave eventually in order to pursue writing more professionally, I told Nick and he could not have been more so he was like that's exactly what you have to do and he came and saw The Sugar Syndrome when it was on there and there was a lot of that I was very fortunate to be around another person who was around a lot of the time who was very encouraging was Patrick Marber you know who knew immediately that I was a writer because of how messy my desk was at the National and to be taken seriously by those people was a huge boon to me The Sugar Syndrome won the Critics' Choice Award for Best New Play and also George Devine Award as Most Promising Playwright what effect did those awards have on you?

12:31Awards are nice but they are I've been on award panels since then and I can see sometimes how it works so I think they're really useful for getting through the door on other things but also as I said I've been in situations where I've seen how actually the workings of award panels work and sometimes it's a bunch of people who go like we've been here four hours, we want to go home, okay, let's give it to so-and-so. So I'm not being disparaging about any of those awards. I'm incredibly grateful. But I also think it's important to point out that they, you know, they're complex things and they can sometimes be given to someone out of, you know, a compromise or a sense of, oh, that's the one I've heard of.

13:17Yeah, but that's the insider's view. Surely it didn't feel like that at the time when these awards came to you. Boost your confidence, yes, I should carry on, I could do this. Oh, yeah, without doubt. I was going to go to law school and I desperately needed an external validation to carry on doing something that felt much riskier or sort of more foolish. Because like everyone who has a family who doesn't come from the arts, you know, there was always this thing of how does it work? How are you actually making money? What's your salary? I was like, I know, I don't know. You know, it's really for the first few years, it's living in London on, you know,£10 ,000 a year if you're lucky and trying to find a way to make that work.

13:54so I was desperately in need of support and external validation and in my head I had thought if within two years I get some sort of sense that I'm doing okay I will stick with this so definitely those awards and getting the play on upstairs at the court in this 90 seat theatre made me not go to law school which I don't know if that's good or bad for law I was going to say do you ever imagine what your life might be like if you had pursued that and you had been prosecuting or defending corporate crime rather than writing about it? Yeah, it's funny. I don't think I would have... The person I encountered who I felt most like, oh, I wonder if I would have liked to have pursued that, was I did a play called A Very Expensive Poison about the death of Alexander Litvinenko.

14:39And one of the people involved with that was Ben Emerson, who's a human rights lawyer who helped Marina, Litvinenko's widow, and managed to achieve an awful lot, getting a public inquiry and so on into the murder. That kind of international rights law is fascinating and so important. And lucrative. Well, I don't know if it's that lucrative. I'm sure it's not lucrative compared to doing corporate law. More lucrative than writing plays, I would suggest. Yeah, I mean, anything's more lucrative than writing plays.

15:17Your next choice, Lucy Preble, for This Cultural Life is a song, Waiting for the Great Leap Forward by Billy Bragg It might have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline Why this one? I remember very clearly the first time I heard it. My brother came back from the Reading Festival when I was in my early teens, or maybe just a bit younger, and he brought a cassette back with him of the sort of greatest hits of the Reading Festival that year. And then I remember listening the first time to Billy Bragg. I'd never heard him before, never heard his voice before and the first time I ever heard him sing was Waiting for the Great Leap Forward.

15:54And I was so affected by it on such a deep level. It was partly his voice. There's nothing quite like the authenticity of a sort of British man who knows he can't really sing but has something to tell you, and the hope of it. So much of music that you experience as a teenager and so much art is based in a sort of cynicism and a call. That's part of what makes it attractive. And I'd never heard something that wasn't, that was the opposite, that was based in a kind of hope and belief and trust in other human beings. In pop and politics, he asks me what the use is. I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses.

16:44It struck me as so politically powerful as well as artistically powerful to me. I'm so moved even thinking about it now. And it's also so raw, and I don't just mean his voice in terms of how he sings, but also vulnerable. The lyrics are not trying to be clever. It's just very clear, which is how I often write, I think, now. And yet it is a very dense and quite complex lyric, isn't it? I suppose so, or at least it's political. Yes, it's dense in its references. Yeah, and at the time I was sort of an age where I felt surrounded by a world that felt just acceptingly capitalistic on every level, faintly selfish and kind of money-obsessed, just culturally, I mean.

17:31I was a kid born in 1980, so I was born right at the very beginning of Thatcher, really, and didn't know anyone except Thatcher as a prime minister for a really long time. So I'm waiting for a great leap forward, an expression of a sort of socialist idea or a hope for change that I've never been able to shake as wanting to sort of copy artistically.

18:02Can I suggest also that Billy Bragg, known at that time for a lot of character studies and vignettes, talking about other people, but this is a kind of self-referencing lyric in which he struggles with the idea of the role of the political songwriter. And it's that idea of art and politics and whether you can talk about politics within the medium of pop music. That's right. There is a sort of self-examination in it that's really beautiful and true. and certainly something I struggle with is how can you, you know, everything feels worthy or sort of maybe even unrealistic and how does politics sit in making art without it feeling finger waggy and all those questions.

18:47It's a song I often listen to to sort of blow the clouds off your soul, your like sense of it's not worth it and I can't do it, you know. But that question of art and politics, it leads me back to, you've mentioned already, A Very Expensive Poison, about the assassination of Litvinenko, but also you wrote about the collapse of the Enron Corporation in that play Enron. Does this choice of this song relate in a way, do you think, to those subjects and that willingness to tackle some of the big issues? Definitely. When I was thinking about plays like Enron or A Very Expensive Poison, I'm thinking, can I take something on of this size, even though I feel a bit overwhelmed by it?

19:31And can I find the humanity in it and the personal in it, in order to make it not just feel like a tirade or some piece of propaganda? the other important thing when you're making something like that though is also to keep reminding yourself of the center of what you believe about it because you can lose that surprisingly easily when you do a lot of research into something when something takes a lot of heavy lifting research wise because you want to get it right whether that's the exploration of corporate fraud or you know the relationship between Britain and Russia and what was played out by a murder happening here in London sometimes you you need to keep returning to the sense of and this is so, I'm even sort of faintly ashamed saying it, which is telling a sense of what's right and wrong about it.

20:18Because I love nuance and I try very hard to write with nuance, but you can get lost in nuance to the point where really you're not saying anything. You're sort of going, well, look, you know, I don't know. You know, you decide. So you need the moral compass at the heart of the piece. I do think as long as that moral compass isn't coming from a place of righteousness, judgment, and a sense of I want to be considered as a writer to be viewed as a good person. That's dangerous. But when you sort of know something really deep down, and that's coming more from a place of, you hope, integrity and kindness, then you have to let that be your guide, I think, in terms of choices.

21:00And so long as it's not ego, then I think people can tell. And you say there's a danger of getting lost in that research, that you lose your way because the subjects are so big. Does that also explain why you don't write that many plays? There are kind of gaps in between. your album. That's exactly why. Look, I really envy the more prolific writers of my generation. I don't know how they do it. I honestly don't. They're brilliant. But when it comes to plays, yeah, I like to take on very, very big themes. Number one, I think they deserve the time to have that real deep work put into them. But secondly, I want to be careful that I have enough to say.

21:42You know, I think about it a little bit like just the artistic version of having children or something. Like you don't just go, I'm just going to keep going forever and forever and try and get one right eventually. You sort of try and you think I have a certain amount to give. For those who don't know, I'm the reason you're here. I said I would only join this company if we started to use mark to market. If you come up with something brilliant, if you have a moment of genius, the market will recognize your idea and your profit in that moment. Enron was really complex in many ways as an exploration of corporate crime and theatrically thrilling on stage.

22:18It played in Chichester, it went to the West End, you had great reviews, and then you went to Broadway in New York. And it was, I mean, I'm not being rude to say, it was a flop, wasn't it? Oh, it was a huge flop. It was a disaster, I think. I'm not sure there's been a greater loss. What went wrong? What went wrong? I mean, it was an amazing experience of realising that the same show is genuinely good in one context and bad in another. And I knew immediately in previews, I just knew there was no standing ovation. And, you know, on Broadway, they'll stand and ovate anything. And it just felt very sour.

22:58And look, I think there's loads of things you could say. You could say we hit Broadway too late. Everyone was sick of the financial crisis by then. And you could also say that the play was almost clumsily sort of attacking of an American capitalism that I think probably New York didn't really want to hear about. You know, firstly, they're not Texas, you know, where Enron happened and didn't really want to particularly feel tarred by that brush. And also was it also about the representation of a voracious capitalism that you were exploring, which was represented on stage by these raptors. there was a sort of magic realist aspect to it as well.

23:37Yeah, I mean, which I was really proud of, and I still really like about the play, that it's not just sort of grey men in grey suits talking about numbers. It's a very, very vivid, as you say, including sort of dinosaurs and dance numbers, you know, in the script, which people loved here. But, you know, I don't feel any anger. I was in the audiences. It didn't work. They didn't like it. It wasn't like what fools they were not to get it. It just didn't really work. And I think as an artist, that's a really fascinating experience to have, to be like, wow, everything could be great or terrible depending on how it hits somebody.

24:12There is no objective, this is really good. Do you think some of the humour was lost in translation? Yeah, for sure the humour was lost. It was very interesting to watch. For example, in Britain, we had this pair of kind of narrating newsreaders who were played with a sort of ridiculous, over-smiley, over-styled gusto. And every time they popped up, we got a laugh in the West End because even before they spoke, there was a real recognition of that's what American anchors are like. There's this sort of satirical kind of sensation of like, oh, yes, isn't that weird and funny that that's how they do news?

24:48And of course, when they popped up in Broadway, you know, styled the same, speaking the same, an audience just waited. They just waited for what the joke was going to be because that was their experience of news. What's so funny about that? Yeah, exactly. That's reality. That's life. That's how people look. That's how people talk. And that sort of happened quite a lot. And then, of course, they realised they were supposed to laugh and there's nothing worse than that when you've got an audience going, oh, so you're making fun of us? Oh, and that's a horrible silence. Well, I was going to say, did you get any sense of a resentment that there was this British girl coming and laughing at us and telling us how we should have done it?

25:25It's certainly something that's been said to me a lot by people who were very kindly trying to reassure and sympathise with me over the flop. But, you know, again, as I said, I was in the room and it didn't work and it just didn't work, so I'm not going to claim the victim over that. You know, I learnt a lot from it. It was very painful to get a sort of battering critically and to see all those people lose their jobs. People who thought they were going to work on Broadway for months. What did you learn then? I learnt what it's like to lead a bunch of people who suddenly realise that they don't have jobs and in fact if I learnt anything it was a much closer experience of something like Enron which is the thing I'd written about which everybody had said why are you writing about it?