Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Stage and screenwriter whose work includes the eight-BAFTA-winning series Sex Traffic and dramas on women's suffrage, tsunami, trafficking, and the First World
On the island
Eight records
It reminds me of my childhood. You know, my parents listened to Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin. But then when I thought about this record, I thought it's actually travelled through every decade of my life. So I took it away with me to university. I listened to it when I lived on my own. I've listened to it on holiday and I sometimes listen to it still when I'm writing. It's very upbeat and I just love the clarity and purity of her voice.
I think it's an anthem for all women to stop apologising. I apologise when someone bumps into me. I apologise if someone toots at me when it's their fault. And I think it's not just for my generation, not just for my mother's generation, but more than anything, it's for my daughter's generation to say you don't need to say sorry anymore.
Let's Do It (The Ballad of Barry and Frida)
Victoria was really dear to my heart. You know, when I was growing up, what I loved about her was that she represented the northern voice. And as a family, my brother and my sister and my mother and I, we all loved this music. And she's utterly without vanity. And I think the recording we're going to listen to is just utterly from the heart. It's very accessible. And she's a brilliant poet. And she reminds me of happy days with my family in the kitchen in Stoke.
When I was 18, I lived in Florence for a year. And it was a very beautiful, brilliant, difficult year for me, actually. And this track I listened to over and over again. I think it's just this beautiful female voice and the swell of something that's so poetic that's just transcended centuries and I just love it.
I am a massive Sondheim fan. I love Sondheim because he wrote for actors and I love the way he balances the contradictory nature of relationships. And so I juggled with this record and another, but in the end I chose Being Alive, sung by Adrian Lester in the Donmar production of Company, which I saw in the mid 90s. And the reason why I've chosen this song is… I found the 90s very hard. Post-university, I worked as a waitress for eight years and I was living in London, I had no money. and I was on my own. And this song captures somebody who's waiting to meet the love of their life. And it was just before I met my partner Jacob, who is also a Sondheim fan. And it's it's it's really a song to say thank you to him.
Aria from the Goldberg Variations
I listen to this probably every single day. I love this piece of music because it always brings order to the chaos in my mind. And this is specifically Glenn Gould. And I was introduced to this version by Steve McQueen, who used an extract of it in a film that we wrote together, Shame. And what I love about this is you can almost hear Glenn Gould breathing.
HoppípollaFavourite
I could not have this list without having Sigur Rós, specifically Hoppípolla. I first heard this properly when I went to the Latitude Festival with Jacob and my two children, Jesse and Mabel, who are now 16 and 14, and they were tiny then. And we watched Sigur Rós perform Hoppípolla. It was a beautiful night, it was magical, and the kids were on my shoulders. And it's a reminder to stay in the happy moments. And also, Jesse plays it on the piano. And there's probably nothing that makes me happier than when I come home and I hear my kids playing the piano. You know, my husband grips my hand and says, stay in the moment, listen to this.
I have chosen Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I saw my daughter Mabel play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz a few years ago and it's probably one of my proudest moments. But also my partner Jake plays the ukulele. So this song reminds me of Jake and Jesse and Mabel and being with them and just it's just I can see it on a desert island, this song.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:08What form does the riddle take when you sit down to write?
I don't do Sudoku, I don't do crosswords. My lovely partner and children are great chess players and I'm not good at games. And I think it's because every day I feel like I'm doing my own form of mental Sudoku. Writing is very mathematical and I'm terrible at maths. But it is very mathematical. It's very mathematical because it's about structure and order. And specifically if you're doing screenplay writing, it's really about order and rhythm and how many pages. And you're constantly thinking about the shape. Is it going to be sixty minutes? Is it a one twenty?
Presenter asks
5:30Why the change? What's the change [in calling yourself a feminist]?
I cringe when I hear that. I'm embarrassed that I said that. If I look back at my work, you know, going right back from the start where I was writing about a relationship between a woman and a paedophile, and then I moved into sex trafficking of women, and then what it means to be a single woman bringing up a child and watching her become Muslim and through to suffragette. And what I'm writing now is that I've always put women at the heart of my work. So I think what's more interesting is my beautiful teenage 14-year-old daughter Mabel would say she's a feminist. And the thing I find most interesting is when I look at that generation snapping at my heels is how inspiring they are to me. So I hate the fact I said that and I'm glad now I can rectify it and put it absolutely at the heart.
The keepsakes
The book
Marcel Proust
I would like the complete works of Proust, and in my mind I can try and adapt them for screenplays.
The luxury
Children's exercise books from their childhood
I have a reoccurring dream which is I didn't go to school and I look at my kids doing their homework and I hear them reading out their poems and I hear my son giving me the equation for ethanol and I think I want to know that stuff so I'd like to take their entire collection of exercise books from when they're children. It'll keep them close to me. So I'd like to take that.
Presenter asks
How did you get along with your dad when you were a kid, a little kid?
My dad was a workaholic, obsessive, funny, complicated, absent, because he was always working. So my memory of my dad would be coming back very late at night, rushing in, grabbing something to eat and going out again. And in terms of how I got on with him, I felt very distant from him as a child, but as I grew older and as I probably entered the f you know, the kind of work he does, he went on to become a T V director, I felt like I got to know him. And certainly he died a decade ago now. I feel at the end of his life I really understood him.
Presenter asks
14:49How did that [your parents splitting up] change your life, your day to day life?
I was brought up very much by my mother. You know, I remember she got a job, we moved to Stoke on Trent and that was quite a culture shot for me from Avenue. From Stratford-on-Avon and before that we'd been in Newcastle and before that we'd been in Wales and we had absolutely nothing. We didn't have a home to live in. We didn't have any money, and I watched my mum pull us back from the brink, and she was phenomenal, really, you know, and she did it by getting a job in the local theatre. And my my strongest memory of her was her rushing home at about five o'clock in a track suit, throwing some chops under the grill and then rushing out again to do a play in the evening. And so she got us through our teenage years really.
Presenter asks
16:46As a writer, how do you know when you have found truth in what you've written?
In theatre, it was when you could hear how silent the audience was. That moment where you have absolute silence is exhilarating. As a writer, it never gets better than that first draft moment when you press send, because you've taken all that energy and all that time and you've managed to get it down on the page. And in that moment, you're the next Beckett. You know, you're amazing. And then the notes come. And then you have to share it with the world.
Presenter asks
27:57What have you come to understand about what it is to be human from the places that you've explored through your work?
I remember I wrote a drama called Murder. It was about four different perspectives on a murder. A woman lost her late teen son in a random killing. And I met this woman who had had a not dissimilar experience. And one day her son went out and was randomly killed in the street. And this was a few years on, and she was talking to us about the experience. And I was hugely impressed by her. And as we went to leave, somebody made a joke, and it wasn't a terribly good joke, but we all laughed. But the difference was she laughed a couple of beats longer. And I looked at her and I realized Oh, you've known insanity. And yet here you are putting on your face and coming into the world again. And how would you ever survive something like that? I guess what I'm often trying to do is say you're not alone, and this is the contradictory nature of life and relationships and change really. And that's what you can do as a dramatist.
“I cringe when I hear that. I'm embarrassed that I said that.”
“I had heard that he'd been called a rapist. And I look back now and think, why did I never challenge that?”
“No, dear, not about the play, about acting.”
“Oh, you've known insanity.”
“I want to grab their hand and say, It's really tough in your twenties… but eventually you will have your own picture in front of you, and you will have your own life in front of you, and I've got that pretty mapped out in front of me now, and I really, really I want to enjoy it and I really want to capitalise on it and I want to nurture up the next generation.”