"I never dared to write a comedy before. If nobody laughs you're stuffed, aren't you?": Lisa Evans in Conversation — Page 4:
JK: Can you talk about the thematic connections in your plays? And perhaps about how you explore them in the writing process?
LE: Mothers and daughters are always there. Not specifically, it's a story that somebody tells me that sets me off rather than me thinking about an issue. I did an issue thing, writing about violence against women and interviewed some people. I found it very hard, however, to then turn such material into something dramatic. The topic in this case was something which we recognise as terrible but I didn't quite know how to spin it to make that work on stage. It's too abstract. Also people's personal stories are always better than the ones you think up as a writer.
JK: Is that the way you normally write, being touched by something?
LE: Yes, then I start to read around it and quite often if it is going to work as an idea the images join up and you find it easy to do research about it. When things fall into place it's a good thing. When they don't, it's not the right project, so leave it for a while and do something else.
JK: Do you find that this helps, leaving things and then return to them at a later stage?
LE: If I can, but I mostly work to commission. My theatre work is subsidised by television anyway; living on stage work is kind of a joke. But this is what I love doing and if I could live on it, I'd do nothing else. At the moment I don't think I have anything that I am burning to write to just sit and do it though. I don't want to write just for me, I want to write something to be done on stage. Being a playwright, as far as I am concerned, means that my work does not really exist unless someone is performing it. When I got published I thought it would feel different but it isn't. Oberon now publishes pretty much what I get put on in theatres — it is nice to have the published plays out there and see that the work is not ephemeral, it is something you can go back to, and of course that libraries and companies have easy access to — but actually it is only when work is on that really counts. It is that immediacy, that's what theatre is about.
JK: I am exploring the idea of performers as mothers/mothers as performers in relation to some other plays I am looking at, and of course we have Ali who is a dancer. I am thinking here of a multiplicity of potentially interconnected issues, such as pregnancy as spectacle (owing to the development of imaging technologies and the possibility of visualising the process of gestation), of the practice of motherhood as a demanding task constantly assessed and critiqued by outsiders — almost on the terms of a public performance, but also of some mothers simply being performers by career (actors, dancers etc).
LE: I am trying to remember why I made that choice. I think I wanted her to be something creative, and involved with something where you have a clear idea of when you fail and when you are good. It wasn't that much a connection with the idea of the artist as such. Also the phrases being "a dancer" and "my daughter dances" were in my head quite early on, together with things like being a "proper" child and a "proper" girl. I was thinking of the opposition between the "right" way to do things and the "energetic, creative" way to do things. That's what interested me. I don't like plays specifically about writers or about actors. It feels too incestuous. I would have loved to be a dancer, maybe that's what it is. One day my partner and I were driving in the car and our son suddenly asked what we both would have liked to be, something other than what we actually did. (I started out as an actor and turned into a writer, my partner is an actor.) Without stopping to think he said "archaeologist" and I went "dancer." When I was at drama school I loved dancing, I loved to be able to express myself physically.
JK: In the play you have Ali who has a career as a dancer, while the other women are mainly if not solely defined by their motherhood.
LE: Milena works in a factory, Kitty is a housewife and mother, as were most of her generation if they could afford it. You went out and worked if you had to rather than if you wanted to.