First developed with support from HighTide, 1.17am… now receives its world premiere at Finborough Theatre following three critically acclaimed sold-out previews at Theatre503. We sat down to discuss this play with its writer Zoe.
1. 1.17am, or until the words run out traps two former friends in a room with nothing left to hide. What first drew you to this “pressure-cooker” setup, and what did you discover about friendship once everything polite had been stripped away?
Pressure-cooker plays are fun – and hard – to write. The constraints of the form mean that as a writer you have to keep digging, really digging, into your characters and the setting that you’ve trapped them in. From the very beginning of the idea I knew I wanted to write a two-hander, and I was interested in what it would feel like to put young women into a more traditional theatrical form.
The piece is also an exploration of grief. I think it’s Pinter who speaks about how in all pressure cooker plays the setting itself plays a similar role to a third character, the setting acts on the characters. And in 1.17am the characters are trapped in the room of someone who has died – which gave me a lot of drama to play with as a writer.
The way you phrase the question is interesting – I think for the characters, theirs is not a friendship where they expect politeness. They’ve grown up together, perhaps they have a bond that is similar to a family bond: they expect that they’ll know and love each other forever. I think I learnt, and they learnt, that this bond is not as unshakeable as they hoped it might be.
2. This play mixes claustrophobia with humour — often in the same breath. Was balancing those tones instinctive for you, or did you have to wrestle your way into finding the right emotional rhythm?
This is a play about secrets, lies, and difficult truths that we find hard to talk about. I do find that in my own life, often the hardest subjects to discuss are the funniest. It’s simply impossible in reality to sit with pain for too long – we need to break out of it, to find lightness. I write naturalistically, following the thread of dialogue and psychologically plausible character action and my characters need to crack jokes, to giggle when things get too much. That’s where the tone comes from, I think: from what I feel the characters need for themselves in the honesty of that moment.
3. The story unfolds in a single bedroom, over a single night. What craft challenges did that create for you as a writer, and how did you keep the structure alive within such a contained space?
It’s all about finding the right setting. Not all settings are dramatic – but someone’s dead brother’s room which hasn’t been touched by his death, certainly is. You have to hunt around as a writer until you find the right place to put your characters. Pinter also talks about status: the setting cannot mean the same thing to each character. For one of the characters, Katie, this bedroom is a place that she wants to uncover, look through, pack away, discover. For Roni, her friend, it’s not. There is a party happening outside of the room in my play: Katie was invited, Roni wasn’t. I didn’t stumble across this setting in the first or second or even fifth draft – it took until the seventh to really understand that if I wanted to write in this form, I needed to put these two women in this particular space. As a writer you need to keep hunting and trying things – and working with great people (thank you to Tamar Saphra and Fay Lomas) to get the drama working.
4. Katie and Roni promise to tell each other “the truth” — whatever that means. In shaping their dynamic, how did you approach writing characters who love each other fiercely and yet can’t always say the right things?
This is just human – right? Who amongst us always says the right stuff to the people we love? I definitely don’t, in fact sometimes I treat the people closest to me the worst: because I believe I can, because I (mistakenly) believe they’ll always be there. I suppose I’m writing from what I have seen and experienced, that often we lie to attempt to protect each other – but the knots that this instinct ties us in are fascinating and twisty and hard to untangle.
5. You come from both theatre and film, and your work often explores personal histories under pressure. How did your experience in documentary and screenwriting influence the way you approached this play?
Interesting! I think something I’m often struck by in theatre is how alone writers can be. As a writer/director in film you get very close to actors, and as a documentary maker of course you’re nothing without your contributors. Working in these other mediums means that I’m very interested in how actors build and respond to characters I’ve written and in rewriting towards their instincts. My documentary work means that I love working with lived experience (safely!) in the rehearsal room. We cast the wonderful Eileen Duffy with this in mind and she has generously fed into the text. I’ve also learnt from documentaries that your instincts as an artist are not always as surprising as real life can be, but equally that real life requires shaping and building to make it emotionally impactful for an audience.
6. 1.17am… was previously supported by HighTide and Theatre503 before arriving at the Finborough. How has the piece evolved through those stages, and what does this world-premiere production allow you to explore that you couldn’t before?
Honestly, the journey of this play has been a long and hard one. Back in 2019 we had a rehearsed reading of the text at HighTide, after they generously gave us space for an R&D the year before (2018!) We had a slot at Vault Festival – but then the pandemic happened. Meanwhile, I was working and developing screen projects. It was only when Theatre503 picked it up for a short run last summer that I dusted off the script and began to reinterrogate the text.
Sarah Stacey (director and dramaturg) has been invaluable in shaping the piece. We had a reading in April and I then cut about 30 pages from it, which felt like freedom. Once the cast were on board – Catherine Ashdown and Eileen Duffy, who are fantastic – we improvised around questions I had. I kept rewriting in rehearsals and we only locked very shortly before the run. It felt really great to write that way, alive and true – it’s my favourite way to work. Now that we have the brilliant Finborough giving the piece its world premiere, I’m returning to the text again with everything I’ve learnt from how the Theatre503 audience responded and also specific questions I want to push. We will do another improvisation workshop and then I’ll return to the text – it’s still cooking! Writing through Christmas, here I come…
I feel very grateful that the piece has had a chance to meet audiences before it’s truly exposed: the show at the Finborough will be the best version of itself that it can be, despite the long and painful road.
Tickets and listing info:https://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/117am-or-until-the-words-run-out