In Conversation With Albie Marber

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Tell us what Barbies and Drillas is about

Barbies and Drillas is about five housemates in that strange period of young adulthood – revelling in the freedom of youth and questioning whether it might be time to ‘grow up’.  

You wrote the show from your experiences of living with other students during Covid, how did you go about adapting that into a play?

Because of covid I got locked down in my first year of university in student halls with a variety of random different people in my block. This meant in my second year I moved into a large student house with a strange mixture of characters I probably wouldn’t have necessarily chosen to live with otherwise. This mixture of people with very different backgrounds, personalities and tastes became a kind of beautiful dysfunctional family! We rowed relentlessly, we squabbled consistently – but we were a team and some of that house are still my closest friends. The joy, the freedom, the madness and love we all shared together, but also the fear for the future I found inspirational. When you live with people as a young person in a house like that – you truly do become a strange kind of family: inside jokes, shared speech pattens, rhythms, mixtures of different pasts and histories all mixed together – that was the spark that I felt. After I graduated I extended the play – to explore how I was feeling in that limbo period of life after education. Feeling lost after the joy of university as my ‘student life’ was over and the rest of my life stretched out in front of me. Students, I feel, are in a strange way celebrated by society, everyone allows them that period of life to mess around without a care in the world to work out life – but what happens after studenthood – when you’re older and it’s not quite as charming anymore – when you have to grow up? 

Tell us about the characters, and which one of them is most like you?

The five characters are very different people with very different personalities. 

There’s Laurie who is still at art school and has been a student for many years, Raff the precocious and unemployed writer, William the humorous and convivial low-level parliamentary assistant, Lottie the headstrong stoner working in geographical finance and Poppy, a dedicated dancer. Most like me? It’s got to be Raff – the writer. A slight tendency to be over dramatic and a sheer enjoyment of announcing that I will be moving out but eternally staying put. He strains to find the poetry in life and suffers a fair share of mockery for his pretension – which I would say I have certainly experienced! 

Were there things you would have like to include but had to cut?

Of course! There were many things I’ve had to cut. The first draft was twenty five pages longer. Not just jokes but other conversations that had to get cut for time pressures. But I would have also liked to see them get even older and find out where their lives have taken them.  

How would you describe your writing style?

Rhythmic, witty, with a touch of absurdity. 

What’s your favourite line from the show?

There are a few I’m fond of! And my favourite changes quite frequently. But I would have to say I like when William says (when attempting to convince the others of the glorious youth they’re experiencing):

“We’re in the time of our lives! We’re in that golden Rubicon, and isn’t it golden? Look, LOOK how golden it is! Golden! 

…Okay – maybe it’s more of a bronze period – a historical dark age so to speak…”

But perhaps that’s because that’s what I like to tell myself….