Lucy Prebble’s career has come full circle. We are meeting in the slightly anonymous offices of London’s National Theatre, where the writer once worked as an “assistant to an assistant” for then artistic director Nicholas Hytner: opening the post, fielding complaints, fixing dinners. Today she is an integral part of the team behind the cultural behemoth that is HBO’s Succession; a playwright of depth, creativity and playfulness; creator of the almost frighteningly mesmerising Billie Piper TV series I Hate Suzie; with a sparkling guest appearance on Have I Got News for You thrown in for good measure.
It was while working at the National, in her early 20s, that Prebble found out that her first play, The Sugar Syndrome, was to be staged at Sloane Square’s Royal Court theatre: Upstairs. Enron – her dazzlingly clever telling of the story of the energy company’s infamous rise and fall, which was staged at Chichester, the West End and then Broadway – would follow six years later. (Prebble is not one for churning out work. She obsesses about her plays. Ruminates. Redrafts. Drafts again.)
In 2012 came The Effect at the National Theatre: Cottesloe – a play that launched Prebble as a writer capable of threading warmth, romance and deep feeling through her sometimes savage work. This summer, The Effect is being revived at the National, now in its slightly larger Lyttelton space, and with an edgy, exciting team on board. It will be directed by Jamie Lloyd, who always injects his shows (notably, stagings of A Doll’s House and Pinter’s Betrayal) with with fire and purpose, and will feature Paapa Essiedu and the rising Canadian star Taylor Russell (Bones and All).
We meet just a few days after the finale of Succession, where Prebble worked as a writer and executive producer alongside the showrunner Jesse Armstrong and a large team of British and American writers. With the writers’ strike raging in the US, Prebble – after working flat-out for five years and splitting her life between London and New York – finds herself in a highly unusual position. She is on a break.
How is she finding it? Prebble pauses and thinks. Hard. When she speaks, there is a slightly pained look on her face, as if she’s constantly analysing her thoughts and finding them wanting, or at least in need of a good edit: “I’m good. I think. I’m really good.” Another pause. Prebble talks tentatively about using this break to catch up with friends she hasn’t seen in years. In the same breath, she mentions that she has come to our meeting via a television interview about Succession. Later this afternoon she’s going to an immersive David Hockney exhibition (“I’m really interested in the technology they use”). After that, it’s dinner with The Menu and Succession writer Will Tracy.
Prebble will also be spending much of her time off thinking about The Effect, for which she felt a slight “revulsion” when re-reading in anticipation of Lloyd’s revival: “It’s like looking at an old diary. I can’t look directly at it but at the same time I’m fascinated. Who is this person? Who made this and wrote it?”
Certain aspects of the play remain timeless. The Effect is set during a clinical trial for a new antidepressant drug, which boosts dopamine levels in an attempt to aid recovery. During the trial, two volunteers fall wildly in love. If the casting is good, to watch these volunteers – Connie and Tristan – fall for each other is a pleasurable and transporting thing. Sexy. Tingly. Full of joy. (Jonjo O’Neill and Billie Piper practically crackled in the spellbinding premiere. Fascinating questions rise up around this burgeoning romance, forged under such strange and clinical circumstances. Is this love – convincing and true-seeming (“It’s the truth that moves you,” says Prebble) – actually real? Or is this love, so tangible in the theatre, just good acting? To what extent, anyway, can we trust those intoxicating pangs of early attraction? Or is love, as one of Prebble’s characters suggests, what happens “when the experiment is over”?
All these complex ideas around love feel just as pertinent and deliciously unanswerable today as they did when the play premiered. However, the aspects of The Effect that have undoubtedly moved on – and Prebble believes will need some “reupholstering” before the revival – are the ideas around how best to treat depression. The drug trial is founded on the guiding principle that the disease is a medical condition rather than an emotional, social or situational one. But Prebble argues that this thinking is now outdated.
“When a human struggles with their mental health,” she says, “the social and cultural reasons for that are myriad as well as the individual medical ones. When you look at the levels of antidepressants being prescribed, you also see socioeconomic deprivation mirroring it exactly … and yet there is no responsibility taken for that socially or politically. It’s only viewed as a medical problem.” This onus on the medical profession to exclusively treat and cure depression is, Prebble suggests, “crippling” the health service – a topic that could not be more current.
Another aspect that has shifted is where Prebble sees herself in the play. When The Effect opened in 2012, there’s no doubt that Connie – a deep-thinker and natural sceptic – was the character Prebble felt closest to: “I was always defensively intellectual and cautious by nature. What I’ve never been is someone who acts in order to discover.”
But in the last few years, Prebble has started to change: “I no longer feel closest to Connie. I’m much less in need of certainty.” Instead, Prebble is trying to act first and think second: “Just do it. Just trust your instinct. Then you grow in courage, which is really the only quality that matters. Courage, and kindness.”
Prebble attributes a great deal of this newfound spontaneity to her work on Succession. When the call came from Armstrong, she was at a low point in her career and struggling to get projects off the ground. The virtuosic play A Very Expensive Poison – a topsy-turvy theatrical extravaganza about the poisoning of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko – was still a few years off. Ditto the genre-warping and heart-thumping TV series, I Hate Suzie: “My career was floundering at that point. I’d done quite a few things that hadn’t happened and I remember getting the offer and thinking: I guess this is the downward slope for me.”
For Prebble, the Succession writers’ room represented a step back (“I’m explaining to you the joke of how ridiculously shortsighted and arrogant I was”). She would be working in someone else’s room, on someone else’s show. Another jobbing writer. But it turns out that Prebble had got it very wrong: “From the very first day, it changed everything for me.”
First up, the new routine was a revelation. Prebble is careful not to share too many details about her private life, but she does say she’s keen to urge young writers not to underestimate just how isolating writing can be. Throughout our chat, the loneliness of a life in writing – particularly play writing – comes across quite strongly: “I had only ever written on my own before, which is a remarkably unstructured and depressing way of working. You’re spending all your time on your own. You’re ruminating heavily. You’re criticising yourself. Those three things are the major building blocks of depression and those things – whether you’re writing or you’re depressed – can be quite hard to tell apart.”
But with Succession that loneliness and introspection shifted. Prebble’s days now had shape. Purpose. People. Up until now, her professional life had predominantly been about play writing – but there was something about that world that had never quite sat right: “I’ve always loved theatre as an art form but it wasn’t my original passion. I was into comedy, music, politics, particularly satire … But there was always a tinge to theatre. Or at least there was back then. There was that slightly academic, grandparent-pleasing Oxbridge essence.”
The Succession writers’ room was different. Filled with British and American talent – mostly from the world of comedy – its atmosphere couldn’t have been further away from the “slightly swaggering, dry academia” of British theatre: “It was like exhaling. Like coming home. Generous, compassionate and safe.” Prebble adds, hinting at just how hard she has found the play-writing process in the past: “I discovered how much easier it was to be creative and funny having a conversation with other people rather than just with yourself, which can sometimes get a little odd and self-punishing.”
There was a practicality to TV writing in the US that Prebble found freeing. The swimming pool location is no longer an option? Write out the pool! Penned a scene that doesn’t gel or dialogue that doesn’t click? Hand it over to someone else! “It was like we were all trying to fix a car together. I was so precious about writing before that … but as soon as you start to focus on the practical, it diffuses all the other stuff. The ego. The intellectual. It asks you to ask different kinds of questions.”
It is an experience that has transformed the way Prebble conducts herself, particularly in her professional life: “Now when I’m on set with Suzie or Succession, I walk around completely differently. I can say: ‘For some reason this sounds or feels like bullshit’, and open up the process to the actors and the crew, rather than holding it close to my chest.” Prebble is really smiling now, arms wide open: “People don’t judge you for that. They respect you.”
Prebble and Armstrong have joked together recently about writing “the novel that no one wants to read”. After years working on screen and being visual and practical, Prebble is keen to stretch another writing muscle: “I do wonder whether there might be something in the terrible authority of novel writing. Where it’s just me. No compromise. No practicality.” Pause. Slightly anxious laughter: “But maybe I’d just be very lonely.”
The Effect is at the National Theatre: Lyttelton, London, from 1 August to 7 October.
