Nina Segal - producer turned playwright
The writer behind Big Guns has learned to like her audience more...
Morning…
Hope you are having a good week. I am, partly because there has been quite a lot of good theatre news this week with plenty of exciting shows announced, but mainly because I have just discovered the BBC TV series Pizza Boys, in which two extremely Welsh lads drive around Europe in their three-wheeled pizza van, incorporating local ingredients into the tastiest looking pizzas ever. It’s amazing.
Anyway, enough of that. Welcome to the seventh issue of The Crush Bar, my fortnightly newsletter about theatre and the people that make it. If you haven’t subscribed already then please…
Below is an interview with the playwright Nina Segal - possibly my favourite interview I have ever done. We spent two hours chatting on the phone last week about all sorts of stuff, only some of which has made it into this newsletter. It was exactly the kind of conversation I wanted to have when I started this newsletter back in January.
Before that, though, I’ve got a wee favour to ask of you. It would mean the world to me if everyone that reads this newsletter forwarded it to one person they think might enjoy it. And if you could share it on social media as well, that would be awesome.
Right, on with the newsletter…
Interview: Nina Segal
When most people go on writing retreats, they seek solitude, serenity, and space. In November 2014, when Nina Segal went to the Netherlands to live in a van without wi-fi or heating, she found the exact opposite – but that, she says, was exactly what she needed to make the career change from producer to playwright.
“It was awful,” Segal says. “It really was. I was living in a van and working in a hastily converted shipping container. But it really felt necessary to make a huge change at the time. I knew I didn’t want to be a producer. I knew I wanted to be a writer. But I knew that if I stayed in London, going to press nights, seeing the same people, going back to the same flat, it wasn’t going to happen.”
Segal spent several months in her van on the outskirts of Amsterdam, working in her converted shipping container – it was part of an artist-in-residence scheme run by Dutch studio complex NDSM Treehouse – and followed it with a couple more months in Berlin. At the end of it all, she had two new plays – plays that she says reflect her experiences during that time.
“I often look at my plays as manifestations of whatever particular anxiety I’ve got going on at the time…”
The first – In The Night Time (Before The Sun Rises) – was produced at Notting Hill’s Gate Theatre in late 2016. A two-hander about a couple whose new-born baby won’t stop crying even as the apocalypse enters their living room, it was compared to Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone by critics.
“I often look at my plays as manifestations of whatever particular anxiety I’ve got going on at the time,” Segal says. “When I wrote In The Night Time, I was in this freezing cold shipping container in the middle of winter, trying to keep the outside out, so a lot of the anxiety in that play is about trying to protect a space and keep it safe from the horror of what is out there.”
The second play – staged at Hackney Wick’s Yard Theatre in early 2017 – was Big Guns, another two-hander that Segal says was written almost as a companion piece to In The Night Time (Before The Sun Rises). If her first play was about anxieties involved in ignoring atrocity, her second was about the anxieties involved in being an avid virtual voyeur of it – about the pull of flipping the stone to expose the unthinkable awfulness underneath, about the barbarity lurking in our browser tabs.
“I wrote Big Guns when I was in Berlin, and kind of overwhelmed by the feeling of being back in a big city and how busy it was,” she says. “In The Night Time is about trying to keep the world out and the guilt of that. Big Guns is about the flipside. It’s about wanting to see the violence and the horror that is out there – and how the internet can be a portal for that.”
The two plays – both disconcerting, both discernibly doom-laden, both produced within months of each other – were quite an introduction to Segal’s style. Since then, she says, she has changed as a person and as a playwright. She still considers the interconnectedness of everything – and particularly the way our everyday life in the West is part of the same system that perpetuates atrocity and exploitation elsewhere - but she no longer spends her time thinking and writing about the various ways the world might collapse into chaos.
“Seeing the world like that isn’t sustainable for your mental health,” Segal says. “I remember visiting Rome and being in a long queue outside the Vatican and becoming convinced that a bomb was going to go off. I realised it was a reaction to the fact that I had spent a long time exploring fear and horror in my writing. Every meeting I had about those plays, I would be talking about ISIS videos and terror attacks. I stopped writing about the internet and the apocalypse after that.”
Born in 1988 and raised in South London, with a Malaysian mum and a dad descended from Eastern European Jews, Segal studied drama at Bristol University before joining the Donmar Warehouse as a general assistant in 2008. She had always dreamed of working in New York and in 2011, a speculative email she sent to the artistic director of Off-Broadway theatre 59E59 took her there.
“He was quite an impulsive guy, and he emailed me back a few days before Christmas saying that he would interview me for a job if I could get there before the New Year,” Segal says. “I didn’t have any money, but I discovered that flights were cheap on Christmas Day, because no-one else wanted to fly then. So that’s what I did. My Christmas dinner was an aeroplane meal.”
Segal spent five years in New York, on and off. She returned to the UK in 2013 to work as associate producer at the Gate Theatre for two years, before deciding to swap producing for playwriting and heading to her van in Amsterdam.
“I felt exhausted. All I was doing was bringing expensive cocktails to rich idiots…”
“There were lots of reasons I decided to come back to the UK and try to make a career as a writer here,” she says. “One of the biggest ones was the amount of financial support that is available here. In New York, I met artists I really admired that were decades ahead of me in their careers but had zero financial support. It just seemed totally unsustainable.”
“I went back to New York for a while after I’d been to Amsterdam and worked as a writer and a freelance producer there for a while, sustaining myself by working in a bar until 4am every night,” she says. “One day I stopped and thought: “This is the artistic freedom I’ve been trying to create for so long, but it doesn’t feel like it at all.” I felt exhausted. All I was doing was bringing expensive cocktails to rich idiots.”
In 2018, Segal had her third play – Danger Signals, a time-hopping, head-spinning three-hander about lobotomy, Arctic exploration and a lot of men called John – produced at the New Ohio Theatre in New York. Later that year, she co-created Dismantle This Room, an immersive, escape-room experience, mounted first at the Bush Theatre, then at the Royal Court, which playfully asked participants to crack the structural inequalities of the performing arts industry. In 2019, she wrote (This Isn’t) A True Story, an exploration of conspiracy and community, for the Almeida Young Company.
Her writing has evolved since In The Night Time (Before The Sun Rises) and Big Guns – she is no longer as pre-occupied with the internet, and with apocalyptic horror – but some things have stayed the same. She still draws parallels between dramatically disparate events, and she is still interested in the juxtaposition of the everyday and the alarming – like, she cites as an example, that recent video of a fitness instructor in Thailand, happily exercising with her headphones in while army trucks rolled by behind her mid-coup.
“I try to be more generous now. Less holier than thou. I try to be more on the same team as the audience…”
“I still spend a lot of time faffing around on the internet, and I’m still drawn to stuff like that,” Segal says. “Everything is connected. Your ability to have a house with a door that locks, and a job that earns you money, is because of a set of circumstances and structures, and those circumstances and structures are the reason lots of other stuff happens, too – on the other side of the world and on the other side of your computer screen. Everything we do is related to the rest of the world, and people deal with that in different ways. That’s what I’m interested in.”
“My desire to provoke an audience has definitely softened since In The Night Time and Big Guns, though” she continues. “I try to be more generous now. Less holier than thou. I try to be more on the same team as the audience. And I try to admit the possibility of change more than I used to.”
Segal is also more comfortable turning work down. She has learned to recognise when she isn’t the right writer for a project, and when a project isn’t the right fit for her as a writer. Like, she says, when she was briefly part of the writer’s room for a very well-known, very big-budget TV series that shall remain nameless.
“I was not prepared for that experience,” she says. “You have to fully give yourself over to a very well-oiled machine when you do that. It was essentially a full-time job in an office, but I was simultaneously working on Dismantle This Room at the Royal Court, and trying to write plays that were completely in contradiction to the style and subject of the TV show. I kept expecting someone to notice that I wasn’t a good fit and tell me to leave but they didn’t.”
“Until they did,” she adds. “I learned from that experience that you need to be responsible as an artist for what you say no to, as much as what you say yes to.”
Segal now lives in South London with her partner and her baby son. She was pregnant throughout the first half of last year and shielded strictly when coronavirus first arrived in the UK. The irony wasn’t lost on her.
“I couldn’t believe I was missing it,” she says. “Those first few weeks when the supermarkets were running out of food and people were fighting in the aisles over the last frozen chicken or whatever, I was sat in my house thinking: ‘These are the images I have been interested in and writing about for ages, and I’m stuck at home’.”
She is still busy, though. She has recently written a fiction podcast series – Radio Elusia, produced by Boundless Theatre – and her next play, O, Island!, was shortlisted for the 2020 George Devine Award. It was meant to be produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company last summer but was postponed. Hopefully, says Segal, it will be staged at some point this year.
“I think that, on an animal level, we aren’t really equipped to comprehend the threats that face humanity…”
Her latest project – Assembly, a production created in collaboration with director Joseph Hancock and the Donmar Warehouse’s Local Company – was also supposed to be staged last year, but the pandemic pushed it into 2021 and into an online format. It was streamed live via YouTube last Saturday instead, with the 17-strong amateur cast performing from their own homes.
“The cast is made up of people that live in Camden and Westminster, and there’s a real range of ages and backgrounds,” Segal explains. “Joseph has done an amazing job of translating into a digital world. I was on maternity leave for quite a lot of that time, so I was protected from just how difficult that was to do.”
It is a show, says Segal, about the climate crisis and society’s response to it. Recently, she has been interested in why it is taking so long for the drastic changes needed to combat climate change to happen, when there is widespread acknowledgment that they are a necessity.
“I used to think it was because the effects of it were too banal, that they didn’t match up to the blockbuster movie version of the end of the world,” she says. “But then we had wildfires in California, and celebrities fleeing from their burning houses. Katy Perry and Neil Young literally running from the flames. That’s pretty blockbuster, and nothing really changed.”
“Now I think it is because people are just too preoccupied with their own lives,” she adds. “They are too interested in playing golf, or having kids, or paying the bills. Maybe it is an evolutionary thing. I think that, on an animal level, we aren’t really equipped to comprehend the threats that face humanity.”
Bits and bobs, shouts and murmurs…
Sound Stage, the series of audio plays co-produced by the Royal Lyceum, Naked Productions and Pitlochry Festival Theatre (remember artistic director Elizabeth Newman, from issue four), is starting today, with Mark Ravenhill’s Angela. You can buy a ticket to listen here.
There have been some cracking features in The Stage over the last two weeks. Firstly, there is Kate Wyver’s interview with Adrian Jackson, founder and artistic director of Cardboard Citizens, which is celebrating 30 years of putting homelessness at the heart of everything it does.
Then there is Lyn Gardner’s long-read about playwriting prizes - and whether or not they are a good thing. I think they are - several smashing prize-winning plays spring to mind - but only when run in conjunction with other dramaturgical, developmental work. They aren’t the answer to everything.
Plus, there is an interesting Q&A with dramatherapist Wabriya King - I like her idea of a “dramatherapist in residence”, on hand to help actors deal with difficult subjects.
And I couldn’t agree more with Grace Smart that stepping-stone venues like the doomed Trafalgar Studios 2 are vital spaces for the whole theatre industry.
Dominic Cavendish’s interview with Rufus Norris on the National Theatre, and the changes it is planning to make to balance the books is essential reading. The Hirokazu Kore-eda adaptation RuNo announced this week is possibly the show I’m most looking forward to post-pandemic.
And this reflection on the Royal Shakespeare Company as it turns 60 is possibly the most Michael Billington thing Michael Billington has ever written. And that’s why I love it.
The Theatre Trust has published the first chunk of its “Theatre Green Book” guide on how to make theatre a more sustainable industry. This chapter is on making the production process more environmentally friendly. It’s a trial version - but you should still read it, apply it, and give some feedback for the final book.
And, last but by no means least, it looks like the Edinburgh Festivals might happen, according to this report from The Scotsman’s Brian Ferguson. Fingers firmly crossed.
Byeeeee…
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Right. I’ve got a couple of pieces to write up - an interview with Vicky Featherstone for The Stage, and an article on the prospects for Edinburgh’s theatres for a new local newsletter up here. Then I’m playing tennis this afternoon.
Oh, and it’s my birthday on Monday, so as an early present, why don’t you…
Fergus x