Shock! Emergent dramatist scoops one of the industry’s most coveted awards with a play featuring a bucolic setting, a dearth of physical violence and expletives, and not a single character under the age of 40. Nell Leyshon, winner of last year’s Charles Wintour prize for most promising playwright at the Evening Standard Awards, is one of the most compelling new voices to be heard on the British stage in recent years, but she bears little resemblance to the kind of hip young urbanite you might expect to stroll away with the title and attendant £30,000 prize.
Leyshon is a 44-year-old mother of two who, after abandoning a lucrative career in advertising in London during the money-mad Eighties, embarked on an English degree with her first baby on her knee, unleashing a torrent of creativity that is finally beginning to bear fruit. Comfort Me with Apples, her disturbing rural domestic drama, which enjoyed a successful run at Hampstead Theatre last October and returns to the venue this month before touring, is just one of a plethora of projects that Leyshon the literary dynamo has on the go. And if, as she claims, she’s finding all the frenetic activity somewhat scary as well as exciting, it’s clear from her dancing green eyes and vivacious enthusiasm that she’s loving it.
“I don’t care if I’m unfashionable,” she says cheerfully. “City life, drugs — they don’t interest me to write about. Why would I want to write explicit sex scenes? It would be like writing about people going to the loo. I think new playwrights too often copy each other. I used to think it was a disadvantage that I didn’t come from a theatre background in any way whatsoever, but now I’m beginning to think the opposite.”
Theatre may not be in Leyshon’s blood, but her background is certainly bohemian. Brought up in Somerset, she was born in Glastonbury, where her designer mother and her father, “a goldsmith, inventor, famous eccentric and a printer”, had a shop selling “beautiful, hippy-ish things” and whose outside walls were decorated with flamboyant painted flowers. Leyshon wasn’t a bookish child; she describes herself as lazy, adding that she was “brought up in a very free way, so education wasn’t the be-all and end-all. I was discovering myself in other ways.”
After leaving the unconventional Dartington College — which she refers to as “the wild, sex and drugs and rock’n’roll school, all rather boring actually” — she briefly went to art school where she says she was “totally out of control”, until the death of her father, when Leyshon was 18, prompted a re-examination of her life. Her stint in advertising was not unsuccessful, but it was unfulfilling. And combining family life with her first forays into writing was, for all its rewards, remorselessly tough.
“There’s a similarity between creativity and giving birth; both are really primal for me. But being a parent is the opposite, because it’s about selflessness — giving yourself up for your children.
“It’s very hard to take time for yourself, but of course if you don’t you get swamped. You feel smothered, and when you’re at home and very isolated your confidence dips, and I think that’s the hardest thing of all — to get through those years.”
She’s not sure how she managed it — probably, she reckons, it was down to sheer bloodymindedness — but, with her two sons now aged 12 and 18, Leyshon is revelling in her increased freedom. She’s finishing a new novel, a follow-up to the Orange Prize longlisted Black Dirt, and as well as reviving and touring Comfort Me with Apples, the Hampstead will give a premiere to her play Glass Eels in June.
Set in an ailing orchard, Comfort Me With Apples is not only a darkly gripping family drama but a passionate requiem for a way of life. “I always think, there was such outcry when coal mining disappeared, and the dockyards disappeared, and the steelworks, but the whole of our rural industry is practically in collapse and nobody says anything.” As with much of Leyshon’s work, the play’s action unfolds in her native Somerset and the writing has a mythic, elemental poeticism — and it sounds as though Glass Eels occupies similar territory. The story of a young girl’s sexual awakening over a hot summer living in an all-male household, its central metaphor is the life cycle of the eel, transparent in its immaturity, turning to silver when it is ready to mate.
“One of the things that fascinates me is dealing with human beings as part of our natural world. We are animals, but we like to think we’re not. So we spend our entire lives trying to suppress our nature.” Like Comfort Me, Glass Eels will be directed by Lucy Bailey — with whom, in a curious twist of serendipity, it turns out Leyshon went to school. They share an agent, who suggested that they might work well together — and only when they began discussing the locale of Leyshon’s play did they realise they had shared history. “Bizarre, isn’t it?” Leyshon laughs.
“We met at the National for coffee and we just stood staring at each other.”
Bailey also directs Don’t Look Now, Leyshon’s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s creepy Venetian short story, which opens at the Sheffield Lyceum in February before transferring to the Lyric Hammersmith.
With its central motif of a dead child and its themes of loss and grief, the tale was harrowing to work on, but Leyshon has relished a process she describes as “like dipping your pen in someone else’s ink”. She is fizzing with excitement over the results, which are based on du Maurier’s text rather than on Nicolas Roeg’s iconic 1973 film with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. She is loath, though, to give away any secrets as to how the piece is to be staged — all she will teasingly reveal is that “there are no gondolas”.
And just when you think Leyshon might be due to allow herself an opportunity to draw breath, she launches into her list of future plans. There’s a book of short stories to finish, a one-act play to open in Canada later this year, a new full-length piece about the superficiality of modern culture — “not a Somerset play” — and another she plans to develop out of the weekly workshops she runs with recovering drug addicts in Bournemouth. “It’s given me total belief in the transformative power of art, its ability to change people’s lives,” she declares of her community work, with unforced enthusiasm. “Really, it’s the highlight of my week.”
After so many years spent finding and freeing her voice — years she describes as a “long, hard apprenticeship” — Leyshon is obviously a woman who doesn’t waste a precious nanosecond. Her partner and children must be glowing with pride, I suggest. “Mmm, well, they are, but of course you know, it doesn’t quite work like that,” she laughs. “It’s more like, ‘What, you’re going away for three days? What are we going to eat?’ ” With Leyshon on such unstoppable form, they might find themselves becoming very familiar with the microwave.
Comfort Me with Apples, Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 (www.hampsteadtheatre.com 020-7722 9301), Jan 18-27, then touring
