Judy Martin is a proud, archetypal 1950s housewife. She waves her husband, Johnny, off to work in the morning and welcomes him in the evening with a cocktail and his slippers. Except Judy – the heroine of Laura Wade’s new play Home, I’m Darling – lives in modern-day Welwyn Garden City and used to have a high-powered job.
The play sprang from ideas about “fetishised domesticity”, says Wade. “Things like Bake Off were just starting to bubble up, and that cupcake culture seemed to be in the ascendant. There was something comforting about those nostalgic ideas of home life and I was curious why people needed that.” She was also fascinated by people who wear vintage clothes and go to retro festivals and car shows. “I’ve always been interested in tribes and the idea of someone who felt they were out of kilter with the way the modern world works. All of those ideas seemed to coalesce in the idea of someone who genuinely believed they would belong better in the 50s than now.”
Wade wrote the play for the actor Katherine Parkinson (known on TV for The IT Crowd and Humans); its director, Tamara Harvey, was also involved from the beginning. Harvey and Wade are friends from university, and the three have worked together before – Harvey directed Parkinson in Wade’s Kreutzer vs Kreutzer in 2015. Harvey and Wade worked together on 16 Winters at the Bristol Old Vic and Young Emma at the Finborough, London, while Parkinson was in Wade’s 2006 play Other Hands and in her microplay Britain Isn’t Eating made by the Royal Court and the Guardian. When we all meet at the National Theatre, it’s clear they are good friends: laughing, teasing each other, asking each other questions.
“I feel like [Judy is] propelled by a deep fear and disenchantment with the modern world,” says Parkinson. Her childhood, comprising an idealised image of her absent father and growing up in a feminist lefty community, has encouraged Judy to create an ordered, fantasy adult life. “It’s a way of controlling her environment. And also, to justify the stay-at-home life without children, she needs an extra angle to occupy her time.” So Judy lives in a suburban museum, with a fridge that often doesn’t work but at least is authentic.
“One of the things that really got my brain going was the idea you could be nostalgic for a time that you weren’t there for,” says Wade. “It’s not like going back to something you fondly remember, but there’s something about it that makes your blood sing.” There is a scene in which Judy’s mother, exasperated, says: “You want to know what the 50s were like, from someone who was actually there? The 50s were terrible.” The sexism, the fact that rape didn’t legally exist in marriage, the cold, and the grey food. “Laura and I went to talk to my nan,” says Harvey, smiling, “and she was brilliantly pragmatic about it. She was like, ‘It was grim.’”
Judy says she is a feminist because “this is what I’ve chosen”. That idea of feminism as individualism, rather than a collective effort to improve all women’s live, is “a dangerous corner of thinking”, says Wade. “If it’s focused on individual choices at the point where that forgets the idea of community or sisterhood, I find that problematic. I think we’ve seen less of that very recently with Time’s Up and Me Too. I think there’s more community spirit, which is a really important move forward, and I hope that sticks. Focusing on your own individual choices ignores the impact beyond you. It’s not empowering, and it also ignores the experience of other women who are not like you.”
The play was written before #MeToo, with its explosion of women talking about their experiences of sexual harassment and assault, though there is a scene that feels right of this moment. The challenge, says Harvey, was to make sure “it doesn’t look like you’ve just gone, ‘Ah, Me Too, I’ll write that in.’”
The theatre world, like Hollywood and other industries, has had to face numerous allegations of sexual harassment. Has this changed the atmosphere on sets? It’s tricky, says Parkinson. People have become more aware of the way they behave, but “the people in our industry who are more creepy, for want of a better word, and manipulative, I don’t think they would ever know what they were doing. I don’t think it’s always conscious. I think it’s brilliant that the conversation is going on, but I don’t think everybody will go, ‘I was behaving like that and I’ll stop doing it now.’” As an actor, she says, “you want the eye of the director on you, you want them to find you appealing and up for the work, and you want to facilitate. It’s really complicated, and I feel now at the age of 40 that I don’t feel like I have to play some games that maybe I did play.”
And, says Wade, “it’s not just about the confidence to bat off the approach but what the approach says about how you are valued – for your looks, your sexuality, your sexual availability – and what impact does that message have on women? You absorb that even if you say a strong no and everybody moves on.”
It would help, of course, if there were more women in senior positions within the theatre: a recent survey found just a fifth of theatres in England have female artistic directors. Harvey, who is artistic director of Theatr Clwyd, has a three-month-old baby, who has sometimes been in rehearsals with her. “Let’s not kid ourselves – it’s lunatic,” she says with a laugh. It has been possible, she says, because Theatr Clwyd and the National Theatre in London, where the play will be staged next, have been supportive, and she has family and professional help with childcare. (She also has an older child; Wade has two children, one of whom is nine months old; and Parkinson also has two.)
“I guess what’s great is that I am hitting that moment when the industry is waking up to the fact that, unless we get better at making it possible for people to have kids, deal with childcare, then we just lose swaths of people – and people with really important experiences,” says Harvey. “If we are making your life possible as well as your work, that will mean the room is a more creative, fruitful, joyous place.”
A campaign group, Parents and Carers in the Performing Arts (Pipa), was founded in 2016 to address the issues faced by parents, disproportionately mothers, and help change attitudes and working practices. Its study last year found 81% of self-employed people in the industry had turned down work because of caring responsibilities.
It’s about changing the culture, says Wade, to one “in which it’s OK to be open about your obligations. I’ve had the feeling before of not wanting to say, ‘I can’t do that because that is the time when I need to pick up my child’; feeling a bit embarrassed that you’re being unprofessional when actually you’re attempting this amazing juggling act.”
Parkinson remembers when she had a small baby, a director dismissively told her to arrange childcare for a last-minute rehearsal, even though her baby had never been left with anyone apart from Parkinson and her husband. “I remember feeling quite ashamed of that,” she says.
There are numerous practical steps, says Harvey, including shorter working days and advance scheduling of rehearsals so people have time to find childcare. She went to a Pipa meeting and someone raised the possibility of job shares for actors. “Nothing should be off the table,” says Harvey. She points out that in physically demanding shows such as musicals, it’s not unusual to have different actors perform on different nights. “It’s just nobody has dared to say, ‘Can I do it because of kids?’”
What’s difficult to overcome, says Harvey, is the idea that all this scheduling and working around other commitments “can feel in conflict with the perceived creative artistic impulse. But actually in any act of creativity, there is also a rigour. I was always struck when Laura and I lived together that she would be up first thing in the morning, at her desk, irrespective of whether she felt the creative impulse. That’s been part of it for me as well, giving myself permission to be organised without feeling like being organised means I’m less of an artist.”
Wade agrees. “I think age plays a part in that, getting comfortable with the idea that…” She smiles. “I used to feel like I wasn’t a proper writer because I didn’t do it at three o’clock in the morning with a bottle of red wine.”
• Home, I’m Darling is at Theatr Clwyd, Mold, until 14 July, then at the National Theatre, London, from 24 July to 5 September.
