Questions of love, life and death draw acclaimed writer from screen to stage

Abi Morgan is much in demand for her screenwriting. But she has an abiding passion for theatre, whatever the difficulties, she tells Sheena Hastings.

THESE days Abi Morgan’s name tends to keep company with the best. You’ll hear her mentioned in the same breath as Paul Abbott, Andrew Davies, Tony Marchant and Jimmy McGovern – the go-to people for high-calibre drama that will have the vast resources of BBC or ITV drama departments thrown at it, the sort of thing people will make a date to stay in and watch in real time. Just as they did for The Hour, her period-perfect rendition of the inside of the BBC in 1956, with the Suez Crisis in full swing, the ordinary man questioning the Establishment as never before, and women in the newsroom beginning to sniff that they would be running the place one day.

She gave a stellar cast led by Romola Garai, Dominic West and Ben Whishaw and backed up by the likes of Anna Chancellor, Tim Piggott-Smith and Juliet Stevenson, a script that was sharp, smart and incredibly satisfying to feast on. As strong on narrative drive as it was on believable characterisation, the series was critically acclaimed and will rightly earn a few gongs.

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The Hour may have brought Morgan’s name to a wider audience, but her star has been rising inexorably for the last decade, with TV series like Sex Traffic (which earned eight BAFTAs) and Brick Lane, and one-off dramas such as Tsunami and last year’s Royal Wedding, a film focusing on a Welsh village at the time of the wedding of Charles and Diana. Her reputation is about to go global, with the imminent release of The Iron Lady, a feature film about Margaret Thatcher, with the dream casting of Meryl Streep as the former PM.

Morgan, who’s famous for her relentless research and refusal to underestimate the intelligence of her audience, has that gift of being equally at home with screen and stage. For all she is wanted by every head of TV drama and can probably name her price, she says her soul needs to be fed by writing for theatre – the medium in which she feels she can explore ideas best. In between her forays into screenwriting, plays have included the Olivier-nominated Tender and the beautiful and complex Splendour.

Now 42 and a mother-of-two, Morgan was looking around for another stage project and fell to talking with her old friends Steven Hoggett and Scott Graham, artistic directors of Frantic Assembly, the company with whom she collaborated on the multi-award-winning Tiny Dynamite, which she wrote ten years ago about the lives of three late 20-somethings on the threshold of change.

“We talked about now, all coming together ten years on, all entering our early 40s, and how different that was; about ageing and how profound that was. Running parallel was death, witnessing relatives dying, and actually putting my own life in context on seeing someone else’s death. I got very excited about seeing the same couple in two different time zones and looking at the idea of marriage.”

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She admits that the process of writing for theatre is “like pulling teeth... yet it’s also soul food”. But, painful though that process can be, she feels compelled to get her regular fix.

Lovesong takes the audience into the world of two couples who are the same couple – younger and older versions of the characters, living in the same house. Morgan says she writes in order to make sense of chaos – chaos being the natural state of things and writing being a means of imposing order inside her own head and in her life generally.

The play rakes over the nature of long-term relationships, what makes a couple choose to stay together, and how they face life’s journey and ending together yet alone, she says. “I like writing drama that creates an invisible thread between the actors and everyone in the room. With this play the thread is the common human experience of trying to love and be loved, the love song of a long relationship with its ups and downs and why we stay together, all that shared experience that acts as glue between us. All relationships, however loving, are complex. “

Her motivation for writing the play was driven strongly, she says, by being herself at the mid-point between her young couple and their elderly selves, who must face the fact that one will die first.

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“I’m very interested in portraying relationships as living, ever-changing things. Even in our final hours, with a sense of imminent mortality, we are all still ebbing and flowing and the dynamic between us is changing, too. I don’t want to sound morbid, as I do also feel a certain joy that I hopefully still have a long way to go. I was at the right time in my own life to write something about love and ageing, and what makes peoples continue happily when perhaps they may no longer be in love. The something that keeps them there is a sense of connectedness.”

What brings her back to the solitariness of writing for theatre is partly the desire to collaborate with certain people, the fact that a certain poetry will survive in a theatre script without the worry of finding so many images, and the role the writer has throughout a piece’s gestation.

“I find that when you work in television or film, when you go on set, our job is done and you spend most of your time talking to the catering staff. In theatre you’re watching something grow and evolve, but there is still that sense that it has to grow a little without you. I tend to come in at the beginning, which is when I’m shaping the script... then there’s a period in the middle when I like to go away and just see what happens. And then I come in again at the end, more as an observer than a critical voice, just to see that it has made its way home. There’s a balance to be struck between being involved and knowing when to step back.”

Writing for the second series of The Hour is ongoing, says Morgan, who studied drama and literature at Exeter University and originally wanted to be an actor like her sister and mother, Pat England. Her mum told her that, frankly, she was too short to be a successful actor.

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Not long afterwards she wrote a dramatic monologue and people told her she should do it for a living. That (“and one rubbish poem when I was 15”) was the start of the big career. In The Hour, the gifted producer Bel Rowley has to run the gauntlet of casual sexism on a daily basis.

It’s not something Morgan has encountered, but then she chooses who she works with very carefully, she says, and on The Hour most of the key production roles were taken by women.

Coming soon (ish) from the fast-flowing pen of Abi Morgan are a film about the suffragettes, a TV adaptation of The Invisible Woman, Clare Tomalin’s book about Charles Dickens’s secret lover, and an adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong.

She is contractually bound to keep quiet for now about the Thatcher film, but has said that she felt admiration and repulsion simultaneously for the Iron Lady’s great certainty. Of one thing Abi Morgan is certain: the best thing about being a writer is the invisibility.

Lovesong is at West Yorkshire Playhouse from November 9-12. Box office: 0113 213 7700.