We sat down for an exclusive interview with April Hope Miller about FLUSH, starting this May at Arcola Theatre. Set in the heart of a London club, FLUSH unfolds entirely in the women’s bathroom. Bodies. Sex. Careers. Shame. Euphoria. Sisterhood.
This show runs from 6th May til 6th June at Arcola Theatre – Tickets here.
What made a club bathroom the perfect stage for exposing both vulnerability and solidarity among women?
I think, fundamentally, in the loo, everyone is equal. No matter who you are, where you come from, how much money you have, what you look like, everyone pisses, and everyone shits. Period. Just by virtue of existing in that shared space, you are breaking down barriers between people and dismantling traditional, more conservative notions of social etiquette.
I also think a lot of the honesty you see in bathrooms is to do with safety- people let their guard down when they feel safe. In general, women are very used to not feeling fully safe, particularly on nights out. You have always got to have your wits about you- you have to watch your drink, watch your mates or stand between your friend and the letchy guy who won’t leave them the fuck alone. The bathroom is not just a space away from the chaos of the night out; it is a place of safety, surrounded by women, away from the dangers that could lurk beyond. This, usually combined with a healthy amount of alcohol or substances, facilitates the perfect environment to bring out raw honesty in women.
I also believe women have an inherent desire to connect and support one another, and in the bathroom, this comes out in full force.
How did you balance the show’s sharp comedy with its more unsettling truths without diluting either?
I think the co-existence of comedy and unsettling truths is exactly what the experience of life is about. One minute it’s light, and it’s laughs, and it’s wonderful. And the next, it’s anything but that.
Life doesn’t stop to allow you to relish the wonderful moments, and it doesn’t stop for the painful moments either. It is the experience of both tenderness and trauma, laughter and tears simultaneously, and how you navigate varying periods of both is a universal human experience. The depth of our emotional capacity is only made possible by recognising that the good bits in life are made all the more sweet because they can never last, and the difficult moments are temporary, and there is comfort in knowing they aren’t forever.
As a writer, capturing the dichotomy of that balance is incredibly interesting but also essential in reaching the truth. Artists cannot expect laughter or tears as a given; they have to be earned. And often to earn them you have to shine a light on both side by side, because isn’t that exactly what makes us human?
With 16 intersecting stories, how did you choose which voices to foreground and which to leave hanging?
At the beginning of the process, I focused on the topics I wanted to explore, and wrote scenes about them in a fairly broad and general way. I found myself particularly interested in areas like body image, assault, relationships changing over time and what it’s like to be a young teenage girl. From this exploration, characters started very naturally appearing and encouraging a whole other layer of depth to these topics. Once I really knew who these characters were, it became easier to decide how much space to give them and their stories.
The play is also a huge game of Tetris- a technical minefield in terms of figuring out, with only 5 actors, what is even possible on stage. You can’t have someone in two places at once. The practical considerations were huge, and once that was factored in as well as which storylines felt the strongest, it became much clearer which voices needed to be prioritised. It’s a bit strange to think there are whole story lines that were cut from the final version with characters no one will ever meet. Maybe in another version of FLUSH!
Were you surprised by what audiences recognised—or resisted—in the show’s unfiltered honesty?
I was a little surprised by how much it affected audiences. Every performance we did, the audiences were hysterically laughing and sobbing by the end. I think the unfiltered honesty, combined with the beautiful performances, is incredibly cathartic for audiences to experience. So much of being a woman is navigating so many different things, big and small, heavy and light, and it was incredibly special to see people so profoundly affected by the experience of this.
I obviously felt and feel it is absolutely necessary to discuss consent and shed light on the complexity and nuances of women’s lived experiences, but I didn’t necessarily think there would be such a hunger for it. I think when you are writing a play, it is very easy to become so consumed by your perception of something that you forget how it might be received. There is nothing more special than feeling understood and seen, and while the play does this for audiences, the audience response (laughing, crying, feeling, hurting) also does this for me.
As writer and performer, where do you draw the line between personal truth and crafted character?
I think my personal experiences permeate into everything and shape the characters a huge amount. But, that being said, there is a point where personal truth isn’t necessarily compatible with the best narrative or character arc. I feel like there is a lot of myself and people close to me in all of these characters, but in the process of creation, they very much become their own entity. Personal truth is almost like the structure of the character’s DNA until they become something that is much bigger than the limitations of my own experiences.
Do you see FLUSH as storytelling, or as a form of collective resistance—and does that distinction matter to you?
I think it is inextricably both. Storytelling is a form of collective resistance, particularly when it comes from women. So much of this play is reclaiming narratives and experiences that very often are projected onto women by society and by men. By narrativising a plethora of women’s experiences, good and bad, we are exemplifying how important it is for women’s voices to be centre stage and for opinions about these experiences to come from women.
Women are constantly being told what to feel and think, how to view their bodies and how to measure their worth. As a play about sisterhood, FLUSH acknowledges this and goes some way to reclaim those narratives to encourage women to feel empowered.