Interview: Abi Morgan, playwright

IT’S not easy catching up with Abi Morgan. I’d say she’s busy, but that would be an understatement. She might just be Britain’s busiest playwright. A successful TV series in the bag, two new plays, two films on the verge of release, and that’s just this year.

When we do finally meet, it’s for breakfast in a café in North London a stone’s throw away from her current base: the former Hornsey Town Hall, where The Hour, her 1950s newsroom drama series, is filmed. The production team (she is an executive producer) is getting ready to start filming the second series in December.

That in itself is a testament to the success of the series, which picked up a steady 2.1 million viewers with it’s winning combination of intelligent writing, strong actors and gorgeous period detail. Forthcoming Morgan projects include The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic starring Meryl Streep, and Shame, her collaboration with artist Steve McQueen, which picked up a best actor award at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

But first there is a play to talk about. 27 opens this weekend at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre in a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland. It tells the story of a group of scientists who visit a convent in the west of Scotland to enlist the support of the nuns in their study of ageing and dementia.

It was inspired by American scientist David Snowdon, whose book Ageing With Grace tells the story of a similar project in the United States, and by an encounter Morgan had with two nuns on a train to Edinburgh. “It became apparent that their convent was diminishing; they must have been in their late seventies and they were probably the average age. But I found them great fun, really interested and interesting, really alive as people. It seemed extraordinary, these amazing women who have dedicated their lives to something that can’t be proven.”

The play, she says, seemed to write itself. “I felt really in the grip of it. It was just after I had my daughter, my second child. I remember being holed up in my office upstairs and my husband [the actor Jacob Krichefski] was downstairs with the babies – I did feel this huge need to write this play. I don’t know whether it was because I had just had a baby, but it does feel linked for me.”

Her daughter is now seven, and the play has spent several years in theatrical limbo. It was NTS chief executive Vicky Featherstone, who directed some of Morgan’s early plays, who became the driving force in bringing it to the stage. A decisive moment came in a workshop with Maureen Beattie playing Sister Ursula Mary, the Mother Superior who has to face her own crisis of faith. “She’s such a wonderful, clever, fearless actress. That character has become like a bespoke suit for her and she wears it brilliantly.”

Although she is not herself religious, Morgan writes about the religious life with warmth and respect. “All through my life, I’ve always been drawn to people who have faith, I think it’s partly because my own peripatetic lifestyle growing up [with her mother, a jobbing actress in rep] didn’t have that kind of rhythm or certainty or ritual tradition.”

At times both funny and moving, her script addresses uncomfortable issues of ageing, mortality, Alzheimer’s disease, the loss of self. “I’m in my early 40s and I think the themes and ideas that concern you do change the older you get. I’m quite interested in dementia and Alzheimer’s, we have some of it within my own family, so I’m really curious about how it affects the mind. And there but for the grace of God go I, really. Particularly as a writer, your brain is everything.”

For the scientists, there are pressures too: to publish results in order to win continued funding, to accept support from drug companies in return for trialling the latest treatment. And somewhere, unspoken, is the pressure to find a cure. “We’re in a society where we believe we can fix everything,” says Morgan. “We can build an iPad and travel to the moon, but we still can’t defeat death.”

Proof, if it is needed, that she is at home with difficult subjects, can be found in her next two films, both due for release early next year. The Iron Lady is about Thatcher in the early 1980s, doing battle with the unions. Shame, co-written with Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen, is a dark drama about sex addiction starring Michael Fassbender. Morgan is reticent on the Thatcher film, but says that Streep is “dream casting”.

Asked about getting inside Thatcher’s head, she says: “If you’re going to write about anybody who has existed, it’s not really personal, it’s about their wider significance, thematically, in the world. Writing about Margaret Thatcher inherently makes you look at themes like women in power, what it means when you’re not in power any more, and the effect of being someone so important in history.”

You could hardly get a more different project than Shame, for which Morgan and McQueen interviewed sex addicts in New York. “We didn’t sit down and say ‘Let’s write a film about sex addiction.’ We looked at the quest for intimacy, and how difficult that sometimes is when life damages you. That led us to look at the way sex has been commodified and how rampant it is on the internet.

“I loved working with Steve, he views the world in a different way and that’s always great. The thing about Shame is that it is utterly a Steve McQueen film. It’s a beautiful thing to watch something you’ve been part of grow and develop way beyond you, and I would say that film has.” Morgan is that rare thing, a strong talent who is also a natural collaborator. “The most important thing is that the work works,” she says. “Everything else is just ego.”

There are other projects we could talk about: the TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong; a film about the Suffragettes for Film Four, to be directed by Sarah Gavron (Brick Lane). Really, she says, it’s just like buses. Half a dozen projects in development for years, then they all come along at once. She hoots with laughter. “My god I’m going to be waiting for ever now, I’ve had my buses!”

In fact, in 2012, she is looking forward to some white space in the diary. “I really hunger for a bit of sponge time, time to look out of the window and absorb a bit and work out what I want to write next,” she says.

She looks thoughtful for a moment, then looks me frankly in the eye. “To be honest, I’m just bloody grateful. There are great writers ahead of me and great writers to come, you’re just part of that big cycle. This is my moment, and I’m lucky. I want to enjoy it and do it as well as I can.” v

• 27 is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre until 12 November. The Iron Lady is released 6 January, Shame, 13 January