"I sometimes think about these three characters as three corners of my mind, wrestling with each other."
Playwright Julia Grogan on her hit drama Playfight and her experimental company Dirty Hare. Plus: three shows to see next week.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan.
This is the free Friday issue, which usually contains an interview with an exciting theatremaker or an essay on a theatre-related topic. This week, it is a chat with Julia Grogan, the playwright behind Playfight and one third of Dirty Hare, the company behind Gunter. After that, there is your usual three shows recommendations.
In case you missed it, here is this week’s issue of Shouts And Murmurs, which is a weekly round-up of the most interesting writing about theatre elsewhere…
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Playwright and theatremaker Julia Grogan has had two very different hit shows at the Edinburgh Fringe.
She is one third of Dirty Hare, the devising company that was showered with awards at the 2023 festival for its debut production Gunter, a thrillingly weird retelling of a seventeenth-century witch trial sparked by a football fight that featured projections, masks, mud, music and more. Grogan also wrote Playfight, a three-handed drama that ran in the Paines Plough Roundabout last year, and is now touring to Bristol Old Vic, Coventry Belgrade and London’s Soho Theatre, in a production directed by Emma Callender and produced by Theatre Uncut and Grace Dickson Productions.
Playfight focuses on three female characters - bookish Zainab, churchgoing Lucy and vivacious Keira, played brilliantly by Nina Cassells, Lucy Mangan and Sophie Cox - who meet up underneath an oak tree to chat about sex, love and life. We meet them first as 15-year-olds, then as 18-year-olds, then as adults, after tragedy has struck. Underneath Grogan’s frank and funny dialogue, there is a compelling sense of the powerful forces in their lives - religion, society, men - shaping their desires, their futures and their fates. Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge called it “a blinding sucker-punch of a play” that is “honest, hilarious, heartfelt.”
What was the inspiration behind Playfight?
I used to work behind the bar at the Royal Court. One day in 2019, in between shifts, I ran to a friend’s birthday picnic in a park, spent half an hour there, then ran back. This friend’s mum had just read this amazing article in The Guardian about rising violence in mainstream pornography. It had been written in response to the murder of Grace Millane, who was strangled to death by a Tinder date while backpacking around New Zealand. Her killer claimed in court that it was a sex game that had gone wrong.
When I read about the case, it ignited so much fury and anger in me. The suggestion that this woman had consented to her own murder made me feel really sick. I had never written a play before but, fuelled by that fury, I wrote ten pages and submitted it to the Royal Court’s Introduction to Playwriting course. I got a place and wrote the full thing.
Sexual violence is present in Playfight, but there is much more to it than that. The three characters’ lives are each influenced by different factors: religion, family, love, ambition, friendship, society.
Yeah, I was less interested in the legality of situations like that and more interested in the societal factors that contribute to them. I wrote to a barrister called Susan Edwards, who had been quoted in the article. We got a cup of coffee and we talked a lot about our upbringings, about our relationship to pornography growing up, and about friendship.
A story started to emerge about three friends, grappling with the difficulties of growing up and experiencing love and sex and desire for the first time, against a backdrop of rising sexual violence. I decided I wanted to centre the story on three girls, each of whom have a different upbringing and experience this stuff in different ways.
The play is set underneath an oak tree, where the three characters meet up. Where did that image come from?
Well, the poetic answer to that is that the school I went to had a tree out the front where we all got collected by our parents. That was where I would rapidly catch up with my friends for fifteen minutes after school until my dad arrived. That’s where the play’s engine of quick, rhythmic, snatched conversations comes from. An oak tree is also the only tree that actually shrinks over time, and I liked that. It seemed to reflect how these girls almost age backwards. They are so bold and brash and certain and ambitious at fifteen. Then, life gets in the way and they become less confident and lost.
How much of the play was inspired by your own adolescence?
There is a lot of me in there. I sometimes think about these three characters as three corners of my mind, wrestling with each other. And I had a similar-ish upbringing to them, and the humour is very much how I chatted to my friends. Yeah, it is painfully close to home in some ways, although the actual story is not something I’ve experienced.
Playfight is actually your first play. You wrote it in 2019 but it wasn’t staged until 2024. Why did it take so long?
The play was runner-up for Theatre Uncut’s Political Playwriting Award and got picked up by the producer Grace Dickson about a year and a half before Covid. Grace and Theatre Uncut kept pushing for it to be put on, but we had a real struggle finding funding. I guess people did not want to take a risk on a new voice in the theatre landscape post-Covid. We actually got a slot in the Roundabout in 2023 but had to pull out because we didn’t have the money in place.
It did really well at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer, earning great reviews and even a shout-out from Phoebe Waller-Bridge. You must have been thrilled.
Yeah, I was totally thrilled. I couldn’t have wished for better actors. They really picked it up and ran with it. They are amazing. And Emma Callender, the director, is an absolute genius.
The play is now touring to Bristol, Coventry and London. Is it the same show with the same staging and the same cast?
Same everything, but it has been upscaled a bit. It has had a bit of a zhuzh up. I’m really excited to see what it looks like now.
Where did you grow up? How did you get involved with theatre?
I was born in 1996 and grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon. I wanted to be an actor as soon as I came out the womb. I did go to the Royal Shakespeare Company a bit growing up, but I was actually more of a musicals kid. Once a year, my grandma paid for my mum, my sister and me to go and see a West End musical at Christmas. We saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins and The Lion King. All the classics. Billy Elliot changed my life.
I did lots of ballet and lots of singing growing up, and I wanted to go and study musical theatre. When I applied to drama school, though, I kept getting told that my dancing wasn’t good enough but getting recalled for acting courses, so I took the hint. I went to Rose Bruford.
When did you start writing?
It was in my final year. The tutors were really honest with us. They told us that the industry was really hard and that we would be out of work a lot and that we should have something alongside acting. I wrote a play about an alcoholic couple called On The Rocks, which I think needs to be burned because it was so bad. I actually thought writing wasn’t for me until I got onto that course at the Royal Court. That’s when I suddenly realised how freeing writing is. I had a lot of mental health issues before I started writing. I felt so lost. Writing gave me an anchor in all the uncertainty of the industry.
You mentioned that you worked in the bar at the Royal Court. What was that like?
Yeah, I’d recommend that to anyone. I served David Schwimmer once, and the guy from Notting Hill who eats mayonnaise. Rhys Ifans. My life was carnage, though. I’d teach baby ballet in the morning, then go and work in the bar. I remember thinking: ‘Is this how adults are supposed to live?’ I met some amazing people at the Royal Court, though. When Lydia Higman and I did a scratch performance of a play I wrote called Belly Up at VAULT Festival, we just got everyone from the Royal Court bar to do it. We gave the director Lauren Dickson £200 for four weeks of rehearsal in my kitchen. Now she has just finished working as the resident director on Cabaret.
You founded the devising company Dirty Hare with Lydia Higman and Rachel Lemon, and staged your first show Gunter at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023. Where did you meet? Why did you start a company? And where did the name come from?
I met Lydia on a hockey pitch when I was thirteen and we have been best friends ever since. Rachel was in the year above me at Rose Bruford. Gunter was born out of all three of us being completely out of work. The two of them came to me with the story and asked me if I wanted to come on board. We were originally going to call ourselves Daring Hare. I have a hare tattoo. Lydia’s family are obsessed with hares, too. There are little sculptures of hares all around their house. Daring Hare sounded a bit corporate, though, so we went with Dirty Hare. We liked the messiness of it. Our work is quite impulsive and chaotic, after all.
Gunter was also great. It was a really fun, really messy, really chaotic show but it had a totally compelling historical story at its heart. How did you make it?
It was a huge amount of research, then it was three weeks in Tottenham Quaker House with loads of costumes and props and a banjo. It was really messy, but it worked because the story at the heart of it was incredibly watertight. Lydia is a phenomenal musician as well. She is in a folk band called Iris and Steel. You can listen to them on Spotify.
Were you surprised by how successful Gunter was?
Absolutely. We did it on an absolute shoestring. Rachel, Lydia and I didn’t pay ourselves. We got just enough money together to pay the actors. We pulled in favours from everyone. Nora’s mum sewed half the set for us. My mum made a swan mask. Lydia’s brother made a bull mask. It was an absolute mess in Edinburgh, too. We even missed our tech in Edinburgh because we got the date wrong. We had to cancel our first show. We did one show after that, then we opened to the press. Rachel was Googling how to use QLab the day before we opened. The gamechanger was getting a five-star review in The Financial Times. After that, we started selling out. We got a Fringe First Award. We were named one of The Stage’s Fringe Five. We got picked up by the Royal Court. We were totally shocked by it all.
What are you up to now?
I am writing a play about an erotic poetry club. I am writing a one-person show about a baby ballet teacher. I have a couple of television shows in development that I can’t say anything about. And Dirty Hare are making a new musical. It is about a woman in the eighteenth century, a maidservant, who murders her master’s son and is sentenced to hang. Back then, there was a convention called pleading the belly, which basically meant you were reprieved if you were pregnant. This woman does that even though she is not pregnant, so she finds herself in prison, having never seen a penis in her life, desperate to get a shag.
So, are you a full-time playwright and theatremaker now?
I am. After five years of waitressing and teaching baby ballet, I am pretty chuffed that I can wake up and sit in my boxers and write all day.
Playfight is at Bristol Old Vic until March 29, then Coventry Belgrade from April 2 until April 5, then Soho Theatre from April 8 until April 26.
Three shows to see next week
The Land That Never Was - various, until March 22
Liam Rees’ metatheatrical one-man show The Land That Never Was tells the remarkable true story of Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish conman who convinced people to pour money into a made-up country in the early nineteenth century. It is “part confessional storytelling, part TED Talk, mostly bullshit” and opens at Edinburgh’s Studio Theatre tonight - tickets for that here - before heading to Glasgow’s Tron Theatre for two nights next week. You can get tickets for that via the button below.
Weather Girl - Soho Theatre, until May 10
This was another hit at the Edinburgh Fringe last year. Produced by Francesca Moody, Brian Watkins’ one-woman play follows a television weather presenter on a headlong, hallucinogenic journey around a burning Los Angeles, and features a terrific, terrifying performance from an increasingly deranged Julia McDermott. Now, it is running at Soho Theatre for a month. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Glass Menagerie - Yard Theatre, until May 10
This revival of Tennessee Williams’ classic play starring Sharon Small is the last show to run at the current iteration of Hackney Wick’s Yard Theatre before the venue is torn down and rebuilt. TimeOut’s Andrzej Lukowski called it “visually eye-popping” and “beautifully humane” in his four-star review. Director Jay Miller, founder of the Yard Theatre, was interviewed in The Crush Bar a fortnight ago. You can read that interview here, and get tickets for The Glass Menagerie via the button below.
That’s all for this issue
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter, or email me at fergusmorgan@hotmail.co.uk, or you can find me on Bluesky.
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