Katie Hims interview, and Billy the Girl review

Here's a review of Katie Hims's new play Billy the Girl, which is on at the Soho until the 24th November, followed by an interview I did with her in the run up to the show's opening. She was particularly interesting to talk to about gender and playwrights, although I'm not sure I share (or maybe don't want to share) her feeling that it's inevitable that "men write men" and women women.

Originally published on Exeunt, 5th November 2013 at http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/billy-the-girl/

Is positive thinking ever more than a handful of snappy catchphrases, and is helping yourself to more fruit and vegetables enough to mend a broken family? The understated message of Katie Hims’ new three-hander for Clean Break would make Samuel Smiles weep, as she wryly depicts title character Billy, recently released from prison, trying to climb up on treacherously flimsy self-help lessons to reach the family life she desperately wants.

When Billy shows up at the family home after a year behind bars, her mum Ingrid doesn’t exactly lay out the welcome mat – instead, she refuses to let Billy through the door, and relegates her to a caravan in the garden, a broken down memorial to holidays past. Each has their territory, and only Billy’s younger sister Amber acts as a go-between, living indoors but using the caravan as an outlet for her not so angelic side. Lucy Morrison’s direction is understated and natural – the family bicker darkly in pairs, scuffing their shoes on dirt, huddled or leaning like teenagers, their performances shining out.

Although Hims ran workshops in women’s prisons with Clean Break, this play doesn’t have much to say about life inside. Billy’s experiences of prison itself are mostly absent from the play; when Billy tries to talk about them, her mother stops her verbal ‘torture’, and only expresses a vague, pounced-on conviction that prison shouldn’t be fun.Naomie Ackie’s schoolgirl Amber is a brilliantly believable creation, terrified by her fear of conflict into projecting a relentless, shy sunniness. Christine Entwisle as Ingrid is a little more two-dimensional, her part written in broad comic harridan strokes that make her emotional struggles with Danusia Samal’s Billy unfairly loaded in her daughter’s favour. Danusia’s naive, sometimes edgy optimism is stunningly likeable, even on its very occasional descents into the twee, and her need for love is obvious and painfully raw.

But this play still feels sharp and current thanks to its consistently witty skewering of life-and-style supplement clichés – big weddings or marathons are just the thing to sort your life out – and affectionately observed detail, emphasised in Joanna Scotcher’s faithful design – shoplifted Alien vs PredatorDVDs, a lino strung up as a makeshift shelter for cardboard boxes of stuff, and Billy’s mother’s silky dressing gown, worn with defiant pride and accessorised by an e-cigarette. This frame round the mother and sister that Billy returns to houses a crystal clear, but distorting mirror image of her past, softening the family’s more brutal edges without ever fully concealing them.

At heart, this is a play about families, and especially about family secrets – about deliberately obscured, then half-forgotten truths hinted at by rediscovered photos or memories. It’s too subtle for a neat resolution, or unadulterated message, but still satisfies as a tender, torn-up portrait of a family group that can’t be mended by good intentions alone.

Originally published on Exeunt, 4th November 2013 at http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/a-girl-called-billy/

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“I got a kind of writer’s version of stage fright,” explains Katie Hims, whose new play Billy the Girl for Clean Break – a theatre company which does work with female prisoners and tells the stories of women and the criminal justice system – has spent a few years (metaphorically) trembling in the wings.

She’s best known for her work writing plays for BBC Radio 4 for over fifteen years, including being writer in residence in 2002, and most recently working on a fascinating sounding series of plays called Listening to the Dead, about communicating with the deceased through seances and mediumship. Still, although her work has recieved plenty of respect and acclaim, she still finds that “there’s quite a cocoon-like quality to writing in radio. If you don’t tell anyone it’s on it kind of gets missed, you’re under the radar.” Theatre, prickling with critics, is a more nerve-wracking prospect – “the potential for highs and lows is much more extreme, you need so many different things to fall into place. And whereas film and radio scripts get shelved and forgotten about all over the place, plays are this unstoppable machine after a point – if it’s happening, it’s happening.”

Hims’ writing process unfolded over a couple of years, and involved “I don’t know how many drafts – I don’t feel like I’ve written one play, I’ve done more like the material for three plays!” Billy the Girl was commissioned and produced by Clean Break. Accordingly, while developing the script, she ran workshops in women’s prisons, with a focus on “teaching and inspiring women, not going in to get material, but still, one of the most inspiring ways to get a story is to get a line of dialogue from something someone’s said.” Still, her work has given her a keen awareness of the two audiences she’s writing for – one at the Soho Theatre, where the play will be performed, and one at the prisons she’s worked in. “What mattered to me is that I reflected how funny and witty the women I met could be, and that I made something that made them laugh when they were watching it in prison.”

The strand she’s pulled from the masses of material she wrote is the story of Billy, a woman who’s living in the family caravan, trying to find a reconciliation with her mother and sister after being released from prison. “I like that it’s about somebody who’s consciously trying to change their trajectory. She’s got these quite simplistic, naive ideas about the power of positive thinking and eating healthily, but it’s all a bit half-baked, a bit like someone’s New Year’s resolution – you root for them even though you know there’s no way they’re going to go to the gym four times a week.” The gap between her aspirations and reality is the source for gentle humour, as is her family life, but as Hims elaborates, “I intended to write a comedy but it sadder than I intended. Still, I hope it’s a really optimistic resolution – particularly as it’s a play that plays prisons, I didn’t want to leave people in a sad or downbeat place.”

Hims is known for taking especial care with the way her radio plays sound, writing in lots of audio effects, and creating different acoustics for the environments of different scenes. I wondered how interested she was in the possibilities of physical environments, and what the visual world of Billy the Girl would look like. She explained that designer Joanna Scotcher’s set is “extraordinary, but I don’t want to talk too much about it and spoil the surprise of seeing it” – although it will be based around the caravan to which Billy is confined, and feature a bear costume. More than the visual, though, she’s been inspired by the way you can “feel the drama is there before anyone speaks, purely because it’s live.” She has a real enthusiasm for the theatre as a medium – “I’m obsessed with it, it’s amazing that so much blood, sweat and tears goes into one piece of work.” Still, when talking about her favourite plays and playwrights – an eclectic mix including Jez Butterworth (“although that feels like saying you fancy the prettiest girl in the class, because everyone loves Jerusalem”) Caryl Churchill, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Pinter and Beckett – she’s concerned about how many of them are “dead men,” who don’t write many women, or even, in Mamet’s case, “can’t write women for toffee!” “Female characters are always entirely central to my work, I can’t help myself because often I’m writing from tiny bits of my own experience, so I think it’s forgivable – men write men naturally, as at the heart of what your writing is your own experience. ”

At the heart of Billy the Girl is a family group of women – a mother and two daughters – whose story has been carefully crafted and researched in Katie Hims’ search for an authentic experience. Over the play’s rehearsal period, she’s found that “hearing it read it through and reworking it with the actors is one of the best ways of rewriting it,” in a process that unfolds more gradually than a two day radio studio recording. Although it’s been slow and sometimes difficult, working on the play has been “like stretching muscles that haven’t been used for a while – it would be nice to put what I’ve learnt into practice” in writing more work for the theatre. Hims is unfailingly modest, attributing her surviving theatre’s “fear factor” to the help of director Lucy Morrison, and the ability to work closely with her cast – a creative network that’s supported her in moving from “under the radar,” diffuse radio into the close personal connections of theatre.

Billy The Girl is at Soho Theatre from 29th October to 24th November 2013.