It is the day after Sarah Grochala heard her name called as the winner of this year’s Women’s prize for playwriting, and we’re back at the London Library, where the ceremony took place. She still can’t believe it: “It was a complete shock, my poor dad was getting ready to commiserate me.” But her play, Intelligence, which begins with the Victorian computing pioneer Ada Lovelace in the 1840s and then moves through a series of unexpected reincarnations, is a truly original, illuminating epic – and as one of the prize judges, I’d know.
The idea for the prize originated with producer Ellie Keel in 2019. After noticing the low number of plays by women being produced on national stages, Keel came across some research that revealed the extent of the problem: in 2018, only 26% of new main-stage plays in the UK had been written by women. With this information, she approached Katie Posner and Charlotte Bennett of Paines Plough and pitched them the idea of a prize for female playwrights. Now in its third year, it comes with a £12,000 prize fund. The five plays shortlisted this year grappled with the climate crisis, the home office, culture wars and AI.
Writing Intelligence, Grochala felt “deep rage and frustration”. “Ada probably died thinking she was a failure because she couldn’t get people to listen to her.” The play jumps across eras – into the lives of Steve Jobs and the US computer scientist Grace Hopper – and hurtles through years of technological development. “I had this real sense that Ada could be propelled into the future, because I feel like she belongs there,” she says. “There is something fascinating about the way people used to view women’s brains, and what they were capable of.”
Reading Intelligence, I was blown away by its detail and knotty arguments. It’s no surprise that it took eight years to write. “There were about a million drafts,” says Grochala, and she admits she used the Women’s prize closing date as a deadline to help her finish it. But, in its questioning of modern technology, the play’s currency is striking. “As a writer, you just have to write about the things that interest you and hope that by the time you’ve finished, people will still be interested.”
Grochala is a thorough researcher – it seems as though she’s eaten up all the information on Lovelace that is out there. “The danger with research is that you can spend so much time reading, and not actually write the play,” she says. But her obsession with science and logic underpins much of our conversation: “I was totally going to be a scientist, I was good at numbers as a kid.”
In the end, Grochala, who is 51, chose the artistic route. She studied acting, went on to do an English degree, then trained as a playwright at Birmingham University. Now she also teaches at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, and is studying towards a professional programme in TV drama writing in Los Angeles. “I’ve been around for a long time,” she says. Her play S-27 won a competition in 2007, but “it feels like a long time since I’ve had a play on in the UK”, she says.
Nonetheless, Grochala has big dreams for Intelligence. “In my head there is a kind of big, commercial production of it.” But in the short term, it is the prize money that may have the biggest impact: “Right now there isn’t a financial model that makes writing something you can live off on its own,” she says. She talks candidly of her fears about the state of new writing post-Covid: “I’m scared. It feels like we’re at a real point of crisis … there’s so much talent out there and so many stories that an audience would really revel in seeing, but they aren’t being given the chance.”
She may be disheartened by the industry, but Grochala’s desire to write is almost a compulsion, and a passion for theatre is in her bones. “I love how visceral it is. You’re literally making a world, time and space in front of people.” She talks of the plays she has shut away in drawers, and her years writing angsty poetry as a teen, all as markers of learning. “But when you’re writing a script that doesn’t get a production on any level, there is a sense that it never got the chance to grow up,” she says.
So yes, Grochala has had moments of doubt. “I tell my students, ‘If you can do anything but this job – do it,’” she says plainly. But today seems like a turning point. Her victory might not have sunk in yet, but there is a sense that her future itches with promise. “It sounds crazy, but I’d love just to be able to write. To have a play on would be amazing. To write more would be even better.”
