Shedding a Skin’s Amanda Wilkin: ‘I worry we’ve been painted as this “woke” sector’

The one-woman show is the first play to run at Soho Theatre since the pandemic began. Its writer and star tells Ellie Harrison about embracing the kindness of strangers, a ‘distressing’ year for the industry and why the ‘ugly’ discourse around Brexit inspired her to write

Wilkin wants her play to make people feel ‘joy’ and ‘hope’ (Helen Murray)

The Soho Theatre is abuzz. It’s 15 months since the cutting-edge London venue has put on a play but now there’s a giddiness in the air. The dress rehearsal of the drama that’s reopening the playhouse this summer is about to begin. The tech team fan themselves in the heat. I hear a staff member whisper: “At last, we’ve got a play on.” The lights go down. The room falls quiet. And inside a neon-green strip, standing centre-stage, daring you to look away, is Amanda Wilkin.

Television audiences might recognise Wilkin from her recent role as Leanne, a member of the bereavement group in ITV comedy-drama Finding Alice from earlier this year, but her real home is on stage: she toured Hamlet to 188 countries with Shakespeare’s Globe between 2014 and 2016, and played Alphonso Lanier in the triple Olivier-winning show Emilia by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm.

This is her first major production as a playwright, but she already counts Phoebe Waller-Bridge among her fans. “I was not prepared to be kidnapped by a play and a voice so completely,” the Fleabag creator has said.