A Mirror is not going to be a cosy night at the theatre. Yes, it has a starry cast – including Jonny Lee Miller, Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds and Top Boy’s Micheal Ward. But Sam Holcroft’s latest play, about making theatre in a country where art is state censored, is very cleverly designed to keep the audience on edge. That’s the whole point, says Holcroft: “We take it for granted that a night out at the theatre is a pleasant experience. But I wanted to give the audience the tiniest taste of what it might be like to attend a forbidden play in an authoritarian regime.”
When I speak with the company a few weeks into rehearsals, director Jeremy Herrin describes Holcroft’s play as a “Russian doll series of plays within plays”. There are lots of twists and turns – proper shocks that must remain shocking – so our conversation gets a little bit cryptic. Reynolds, who is very quiet and very thoughtful, is still trying to figure the play out: “I read it in one hit. It’s very thrilling and there are so many layers to it. It’s not a simple play to perform. We’re constantly trying to unpick things and get in deeper.”
Like much of Holcroft’s work, A Mirror cultivates a double sense of reality and a growing unease. “It’s almost like you have a melody and counter-melody and the audience realise they’ve been watching something else all along,” Herrin says. When I read the play for the first time, it feels a lot like walking through a looming hall of mirrors. All is not right. The reflections look just a little bit off and something dangerous is definitely hiding in the shadows. It’s the type of play that delights in sucking you into the moment, only to suddenly break the spell.
The play starts out at a wedding, as we gather to see a young couple tie the knot. Only the doors are being watched and the costumes seem a bit off. A new reality is revealed. To describe it too much would be to ruin the surprise so carefully woven into Holcroft’s piece – but Miller looms large as an ominous authority figure, Reynolds plays his conflicted assistant, and Ward is a man very much trapped between two worlds. Or three. Or four.
Mystery and dual realites shimmer through most of Holcroft’s writing. In her early work, Cockroach, the school biology lab and battlefield literally bleed into each other. Comedy thriller Edgar and Annabel is about a couple under surveillance, while Holcroft’s most high-profile play, Rules of Living (which ran at the London’s National Theatre in 2015), explored the unspoken rules by which we all live. On one level, the play depicted a fairly standard family gathering. But the stage was laid out like a board game and rigged with forfeits, highlighting the secret behaviours that make the family tick – and risk tearing them apart (“When Matthew tells a lie, he must sit down … ”).
A Mirror was partly inspired by a “life-changing” trip to North Korea that Holcroft took in 2011, alongside her husband and fellow playwright Al Blyth. The trip was sanctioned by the government and was, says Holcroft, “a piece of theatre like nothing I’ve ever seen”. The couple were put up in a hotel on an island in the middle of Pyongyang city and told to stay inside. Desperate for exercise, Holcroft’s husband marched up and down the stairs of their tower block … only to stumble upon a corridor packed with people with headphones listening in.
Holcroft and Blyth came home shaken – and seriously questioning their work as writers. These questions grew louder when Holcroft travelled to Beirut with the Royal Court International Department writers’ programme from 2013 to 2015. Holcroft worked with playwrights from Lebanon and Syria, all of whom would expect to submit their work to the censorship bureau of their countries. On the night of the performance, some of the writers grew terrified there would be secret police in the audience and tore chunks out of their scripts, in fear of causing offence.
Later that night, Holcroft found herself crying in the toilets. “I remember feeling ashamed by my tears,” she says. “I think in the west we flatter ourselves that we’re quite brave as writers. But when I compare myself to these writers I met in Beirut, the risk I take is really no risk at all. I risk a bruised ego. They risk a bruised face and broken bones.”
Their bravery of those writers stayed with Holcroft and forced her to confront some difficult questions: “Would I write in the same circumstances? I really don’t know if I would. I have two little girls and I don’t know if there’s anything I could ever write that could justify orphaning them or abandoning them. But I wanted to write about it because I was fascinated by the question and I wanted the audience to ask it, too.”
Holcroft takes years to write her plays so, while ideas around freedom of speech and censorship feel pertinent today, she doesn’t necessarily seek out timely topics. “I write so slowly that I have to choose projects based on what will sustain my interest over a long period of time,” she says. “Is this something that I can come back to again and again, potentially over years and years? I have to believe in the subject, idea or character and hope there is something timeless about that.”
Four years ago, Holcroft was diagnosed with autism. It came quite out of the blue, off the back of reading an article her husband stumbled upon over breakfast. But the diagnosis has really helped Holcroft to unlock the way she fits into the world: her longstanding obsession with theatre and human behaviour; and the reason, perhaps, that lots of her works hover at the edges of things.
“It’s only since being diagnosed with autism that I retrospectively wonder if the form of theatre has been one of my special interests,” she says. “A symptom of having an autism spectrum condition can be that you have special interests – things that you fixate on and focus on and can think about with a hyper-focus for hours on end. I am coming to wonder whether one of mine is theatrical form.”
Since she was a little girl, Holcroft has always been fascinated by theatre (she was “mesmerised” by the toads in Toad of Toad Hall) and human behaviour. “I watched how people behaved and studied it like a science,” she says. “I was analysing it and breaking it down and trying to create a model for myself about how to behave. It felt like everyone else got a rulebook that I didn’t. So I had to write my own.”Looking back, Holcroft can see the influence of autism running through her work: “Most of plays have scripts, have rules, have plays with plays, and are about how we play act in life. And that’s because I thought we all were.”
Initially the diagnosis came as a relief. For all of her life, Holcroft had thought of herself as a “struggling normal person”. Now the narrative could change: “Perhaps you’re not a failure of a normal person but a successful neurodivergent person.” After the relief came grief: “You realise you have been pursuing a fix your whole life. For me, it was this: if I could just decode human behaviour enough, then maybe I’ll figure out how to do it as well as other people.”
Holcroft is talking publicly about being autistic for the first time and speaks with total clarity and deeply felt honesty. “After grief comes acceptance; that there’s nothing wrong with you and you’re just different,” she says. “You can embrace those differences. I’m an artist so hopefully I can use it in my art.”
When Holcroft discusses being autistic and her approach to writing for the theatre, the two are nearly impossible to separate. “That’s why I’m a writer, she says. “Because I have observed human behaviour like it’s a science and I have wanted to find ways to express my confusion. It’s almost like looking through a window at the rest of the world and I’m on the outside.”
At this point Holcroft forms a frame with her hands. “And that’s the theatre in a way – a little box we watch where the world plays out.”
A Mirror is at the Almeida theatre, London, Tuesday 15 August to 23 September.
