Alice Birch: ‘Being called an armchair feminist made me furious’

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jan/22/alice-birch-playwright-interview-we-want-you-to-watch

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“I find talking very difficult,” says Alice Birch with the faintest of laughs. “Particularly talking about my work. This” – she gestures at the room, the tape recorder, my notepad – “this … is very unusual.”

I can see what she means. My questions are met with jagged pauses and hesitant silences. She smoothes her jumper, looks out of the window, diligently striving to find the right words. It’s not that Birch doesn’t like talking: the opposite. She fizzes with ideas and enthusiasm on everything from the ongoing influence of Sarah Kane to the overabundance of facial hair in certain districts of London. I just sense that talking about her work is a form of torture.

She might have to get used to it: 2015 looks like being a big year. Yesterday one of her plays was announced as part of the new season at the National Theatre, Rufus Norris’s first. In a matter of weeks another of her scripts, Little Light, will go on stage at the small but influential Orange Tree theatre in west London.

And for all that Birch herself is an unassuming presence – her voice so quiet I can sometimes hardly detect it on the tape – her plays are gloriously full-throated. She arrived on the scene aged 24 in 2011 with Many Moons, which explored with unsettling intimacy themes of child abuse in a bohemian north London borough. It was followed by Astronauts, co-written with a group of 16 to 19-year-olds, which laid into the bedroom tax and the pontifications of Boris Johnson with equal relish.

But for many people – or as many could squeeze into the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Other Place and the upstairs studio at London’s Royal Court – Birch exploded into view last summer with Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. Responding to the proposition by the American historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich that “well-behaved women seldom make history”, the play was kaleidoscopic, unruly, searing, sharply funny – an all-guns-blazing attack on everything from marriage proposals (“You essentially said you wanted to reduce your income tax,” sighs a female character) to the misogynistic phrases of sexting. Playwright Mark Ravenhill declared Revolt a “landmark”, and it was joint winner of the George Devine award, whose alumni include Mike Leigh, Hanif Kureishi and Lucy Prebble.

Birch’s means may be modest (Revolt had a multi-casting cast of six), but her ideas are big. What fires her up? “Um, many things, I think. With Revolt I knew I wanted to say something quite loudly and also that I was pissed off. I was reading a lot of stuff that was making me angry. But as you start saying ‘angry play about feminism’, people get uncomfortable.” Another pause. “There’s sometimes a sense of telling people to catch up. But I don’t want to have a conversation about why we still need the word feminism.”

One of the arresting things about Revolt was that it was a play, above all, about language: how the words men and women use with each other shape their relationships and society at large. For all its satirical punch, it was a kind of manifesto for how we might treat one another more kindly and equally. She looks thoughtful. “For me it’s the whole job, language – those are the tools. It’s quite old-fashioned. I take it really seriously.”

Birch doesn’t want to say too much about the new NT show – she’s in the rehearsal studio honing it this week – but she hints that it’ll be close to the spirit of Revolt. Created in collaboration with the the anarchic dance-theatre collective RashDash and titled We Want You to Watch, it will depict the journey of two female characters as they take on the porn industry and attempt to pull the plug.

“They want to end all porn. We’re still working through the material, but we’re planning a scene where they speak to a young girl who’s a mega-hacker. They want to bring down the internet. It’ll end up in a world that’s weird, quite punk. Serious and radical, but also ridiculous and funny.”

End pornography entirely? “It’s a little surreal, about pushing things to the extreme. Porn is such a monster issue, and people sometimes accuse you of being conservative or anti-sex if you’re against it. We’re very much pro-sex. But humour is a brilliant weapon.”

After the experimental fireworks of Revolt and We Want You to Watch, her Orange Tree play, Little Light, comes as a surprise. Though no less candid, it’s more domestic in scale, focusing on two sisters meeting for Sunday lunch (one sister seems on the verge of doing something ghastly with a carving knife) and coming to terms with a bitter secret from their past.

Little Light was actually her first full-length script, Birch explains: written just after she left university, it has echoes of her own life. “Of course it’s fictional, but I wanted to write about sisters – that relationship can be so complicated. It’s an exploration of grief and of family; there’s something very particular about when families get together and tell stories about their past.”

I heard she and her sister grew up on a commune? “Near Malvern. It’s called Birchwood Hall. My parents weren’t married, so they called us both Birch.” She smiles. “I always think that’s the most interesting thing about me. But we were only there until I was about five.”

Have her family politics affected her own? “I remember my stepdad calling me an armchair feminist when I was about 14, which made me really furious. He was probably right. I’ve tried to get out of the armchair.”

In Birch’s in-tray is a teetering stack of projects, including a commission from the Royal Court, a children’s play for touring troupe Pentabus and a work for Clean Break, who specialise in drama relating to women and crime, and a screenplay in development for the iFeatures programme, an adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s Russian novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. She’s determined not to get pigeonholed, but right now feels the strong urge to write for female performers: “I would like to write about masculinity one day, but at the moment it’s not difficult to focus.”

It’s striking that – after a period in which the National was accused of not doing enough to promote the work of female writers – the new NT season includes so much work by women, I say: two texts by Caryl Churchill, an adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman by Carol Ann Duffy, Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker. “It looks like a really exciting season, and it’s great to see so many women there.” She laughs. “We’re all humans. That shouldn’t seem like a radical statement.”

Near the end of the interview she finally shrugs off the jumper. I suddenly see she’s pregnant. This really will be a big year. When is she due? “Not long now, 8 March.” She laughs. “International Women’s Day. It’s great.”

• Little Light is at the Orange Tree, Richmond, 4 February–7 March. We Want You to Watch will be at the National Theatre from 11 June to 11 July.