After a critically acclaimed run at Theatre503, Good For Her! powers into The Other Palace for a hotly anticipated return to London. This sharp, subversive solo show from emerging writer-performer Mollie Semple (Dumping, Cockpit Theatre; Persephone, Brighton Fringe) is a darkly funny gut-punch about ambition, womanhood and the calamity of building a life on everyone else’s terms.
“Good For Her!” starts with comparison culture — do you think social media has
made us more ambitious, or just more miserable?
That’s a big question. I don’t think it’s a cop out to say both. Social media in the past has
allowed me to meet people, create a network, share my work, push myself. It’s also
somewhere I step back from a lot now because I just don’t find apps like Instagram very
conducive to actual, authentic connection anymore and X is owned by a raving lunatic so
Twitter days are well and truly over. But Iris is unhappy for lots of reasons; I would say that
her relationship with social media and comparison culture compounds that.
Iris becomes obsessed with someone who seems to have ‘made it’. Have you ever
caught yourself falling into that comparison trap?
Yes. A lot. That’s where Iris comes from. I found comparing myself to others a very ugly, very
unhappy space to be in, and I wanted to externalise that and push it to its extremes.
Comparison is very much the thief of joy, and it’s also a fallacy. Whatever you do have,
someone else is most likely envious of it. So we’re all in a big loop of negative comparison.
It’s all a bit silly really, but when you’re in it it feels real and for Iris it very much is a source of
her unravelling.
You describe Iris as deeply flawed but still someone audiences can root for. What was
the hardest flaw to give her?
I don’t know if there was a single flaw that was the hardest, but Good For Her! Is ultimately a
tragedy so I needed to give her a flaw that would lead her through a series of decisions she
could never come back from. That was the challenge I wanted to set myself when I started
writing.
The play tackles the pressure on women to ‘have it all’. Do you think that expectation
is getting better or worse?
I believe that expectation exists in the late-capitalist hellscape we find ourselves in and has
probably stayed much the same over the years, only evolved into new shapes. So it’s not
better by any stretch, but perhaps it’s not any worse either. At one point in the play Iris says
that she used to feel sorry for her mum’s generation with Special K diet culture, but finds
herself in a not so distant society obsessed with Ozempic so who’s to say anything’s really
changed?
There’s a lot of dark humour in the show. Was there a moment when you thought,
“This is too awful to laugh at” — and then laughed anyway?
Before I performed the show last year, I was nervous that the audience would think me
deranged. I do take this play to a very dark place, and expect everyone to keep laughing along with me. Fortunately, I actually think the audience can be even darker than I am.
There’s a part in the play that I always find very sad, and last year one audience laughed
their heads off at it!
If audiences leave with one thought stuck in their heads after 75 minutes with Iris,
what do you hope it is?
Good for her!?