Every word is a wrestling match for Alice Birch. “I find it quite painful,” the award-winning playwright and screenwriter admits. “It’s ugly and horrible. It’s not just pouring out of me. It feels, yeah …” She shrugs in the empty courtyard of London’s Somerset House. “… not very healthy or whatever.”
We meet early in the morning as Birch needs to race off to a secret project. She is a sought-after TV writer (on Succession and Normal People) but Birch’s blazing plays are known for their form and fury. Her brutal breakout in 2014, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, was written in a 72-hour whirl. She wrote her latest, Romans – now on at the Almeida – in around 10 days. “Of course I didn’t ‘write’ it in 10 days,” she clarifies. “I wrote it in eight years. It’s just that the words,” she waves the air around her head, “were up here.” She would love to squirrel away for a year working solely on one project. “But I guess life and kids and all the rest of it just never made that possible.”
