In 2010, Zoe Cooper was at the National Theatre watching a revival of Season’s Greetings by Alan Ayckbourn. She remembers seeing Catherine Tate as Belinda, a middle-aged woman neglected by her husband and seduced by a friend as she attempts to host a disastrous family Christmas. “She was doing a monologue and there was this moment,” Cooper says excitedly, “that made me think she deserves to be on this huge stage, even though she’s this suburban housewife.” There’s a pause before she continues, quietly: “She should be on that stage.”
As I talk to Cooper in a gloomy corner of a London bar, her soft voice almost drowned out by the music, she describes the inestimable value in writing about people who wouldn’t expect to have plays written about them. “I want to write about the people I know. I feel more qualified to write that than if I was writing about kings.”
In Cooper’s first full-length play, Nativities, there’s 18-year-old Stella, the new girl at a call centre in Newcastle whose name no one can remember – not even the boss who gets her pregnant – trying to survive the petty politics of office life. In Petrification, there’s Sean, following in his father’s footsteps as a docker in Gateshead, and his estranged brother Simon, who thinks that moving to London will help him make something of his life.
At first glance, Cooper’s latest play, Jess and Joe Forever, is a trad boy-meets-girl romcom. Set in the Norfolk fens, the coming-of-age tale follows two young friends facing the hormonal onslaught of adolescence. Jess is a spoilt middle-class girl from Twickenham; Joe is a dour farmer’s son. As far as their parents are concerned, East Anglia is East Anglia and west London is west London. Never the twain should meet. What emerges, however, is a snapshot of a nation deeply divided by class, and the savage consequences this will have for the next generation. The play explores gender identity and eating disorders, but for Cooper, “issues” aren’t really the issue. Most people’s lives, she reckons, are very ordinary. She’s more interested in finding magic in the mundane than worrying about a headline theme.
Cooper says Jess and Joe Forever is the most honest thing she’s written. Like townie Jess, she grew up in suburban Twickenham. Her dad, Robert Cooper, was a TV producer (“he made big masculine stuff about being a man, and Ballykissangel”) and her mum is the actor Jenny Howe, who played headteacher Mrs Keele in Grange Hill in the 90s as well as performing at the National Theatre in shows directed by Katie Mitchell and Annie Castledine. In 2011, Cooper moved to Newcastle upon Tyne, where both Nativities and Petrification were produced with Live Theatre. So when Jess and Joe Forever started its tour at the Orange Tree in London (as a co-production with Farnham Maltings), she wasn’t a familiar name. “On the first night I heard someone say very loudly: ‘I don’t know, it’s by Zoe something.’ It was mortifying,” she laughs.
But Newcastle suits Cooper. “I can live up there like a normal person. I’m married, I have nothing to do with theatre a lot of the time, we’re getting a dog … All those things allow me to breathe a bit.” That breathing space has allowed her to explore, in Jess and Joe Forever, what she’d only hinted at in her other plays – queerness in particular. With one of her earlier pieces, every director she worked with insisted that a character she’d written as straight was a lesbian. Cooper thinks there might have been some truth to that, even if she wasn’t ready to admit it at the time.
Cooper came out to her extended family a couple of years ago, anxious about how they would react: “My prejudice was that they wouldn’t be OK with it.” Although she talks about the importance of representing LGBT people on stage, she warns me about reading autobiography into her plays: “It happens more to minorities than it does to white, straight men, that you must be writing your experience.”
While studying for the influential MPhil in playwriting at the University of Birmingham under David Edgar and Steve Waters – a course that has launched many successful playwrights, including Duncan Macmillan and Sarah Kane – Cooper struggled to write the type of play the course demanded. “They wanted plays that were ‘about’ the railways or whatever, and mine were really not. I am political, but my surface politics are not as readable.”
What she now tells her own students at Newcastle University, where she and her wife are both studying for PhDs, is: “Learn the form. Then you can be like: ‘Screw it, I know the rules and I can do what I want.’”
- Jess and Joe Forever is at the Orange Tree, Richmond, until 8 October. At Spring Arts and Heritage Centre, Havant, 13 October; Marlowe Studio, Canterbury, 14-15 October and touring until 4 November.
