Maryland writer Lucy Kirkwood: ‘The normalisation of violence against women is generationally handed down’

The Olivier award-winning playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s short play ‘Maryland’, written in response to the murders of several women, has been made into a BBC film. She talks to Jessie Thompson about the gendered compromises women make to be safe, pseudonyms, and being in her ‘f*** it’ era

‘Maryland’ playwright Lucy Kirkwood (Alamy)

At the end of Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland, nobody clapped. The silence was potent. No one knew what to do. The short, stinging play – a response to the murders of Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman – had been written in just two days. The Royal Court Theatre staged it last year – so swiftly that it was performed by a rotating cast of actors, all reading from scripts, with a set so bare that chalk was used to mark out the play’s locations. But then, as audience members left, something started to happen. They began to quietly pick up the pieces of chalk and write messages on the stage. Things like: “Thank you.” Or: “I’m pleased I was here tonight.” Or: “I needed this.” A moment of communion had been forged from a shared, righteous anger. “We were paying respects and protesting at the same time, just by being there,” Kirkwood tells me, talking on Zoom from her shed in Suffolk, the sun shining through the open doors.

Applause, she adds, would not have been appropriate. “It’s not a play that’s about going, ‘Oh, bravo!’ It’s a play that’s about giving you a left hook.” In Maryland, two women – both called Mary – go to a police station to report an experience of sexual assault. They are treated patronisingly and indifferently. A male police officer warns them not to talk to one another. An all-female chorus of furies appear like guardians, describing private fears that have become banal in their ubiquity: “I have Googled how to kick out a taillight from inside the boot of a car.” At its heart are two questions: why are women so killable? And why aren’t we angrier about it?

Now Maryland has been made into a film by the BBC. It stars Zawe Ashton, Hayley Squires and Daniel Mays, and Kirkwood has directed it herself, alongside documentary-maker Brian Hill. The Olivier Award-winning playwright of Chimerica and The Children feels deeply aggrieved by misogyny; after the news of Roe v Wade broke, she remembers telling her husband: “I can’t believe people hate women so much.” Maryland is Kirkwood at her most vivid: the humour is mordant, the politics uncompromising. It feels like the perfect alchemy of her distinctive powers.

There really is such a place as Maryland: it’s a neighbourhood in east London, near where Kirkwood grew up – and, she adds, where 35-year-old Zara Aleena was recently murdered on her way home from a night out. But in the play, “it’s this psychic space that women live in, that men don’t”. One of Maryland’s most striking speeches is from the male police officer, played by Mays in the film. DC Moody describes his mum – also called Mary – as “an anxious woman… she’d be in her head with her worries, a million miles away. My dad would say, ‘Ah don’t bother son, she’s away to Maryland again’.”

The moment is important because Maryland is more interested in the normalisation of violence against women than the violence itself. “That speech is about a parenting failure – it’s generationally handed down. It’s his dad saying, at a really young age, ‘I’m gonna give you licence to just not bother. To look at a woman who’s quite anxious and stressed about something and go, I’m not going to ask’.” Kirkwood was struck by a conversation she’d had with a porn director as part of the research for her Channel 4 drama Adult Material, in which Squires plays a top UK porn star. He told her that the actresses were always showing up “pissed or late”; Kirkwood wondered if he ever asked why. “To me, if I was working in an office and my colleague showed up pissed or late constantly, I’d be like... ‘they don’t want to be here, maybe there’s something going on at home… I need to ask them about it!’ And he looked so shocked. Genuinely shocked.” He had, in fact, never asked them. This isn’t deliberate, she believes, but because “we inculcate men to do that, from a young age – just don’t push on that door”.

As well as Chimerica, her three-hour epic about geopolitical tensions between China and America, Kirkwood’s previous works include a comedy about particle physics (Mosquitoes, which starred Olivia Colman in 2017) and an epic about an 18th century comet and an all-female jury (The Welkin in 2020). Her ambition seems dauntless. In person, though, she’s warm and voluble; ideas form fast; sentences tumble out. She always knew she didn’t want to make any money from Maryland; she’d had a daughter in lockdown and had budgeted to take maternity leave, so could afford not to be paid. She also waived the rights, making the script free to perform for anyone, so that even small theatre groups with no budget could produce it. “I wanted it just to be shared with everyone.”

Hayley Squires and Zawe Ashton in ‘Maryland' (BBC/Century Films Ltd/Sarah Weal)

There’s an immediate sense of recognition to Maryland’s description of what women do to feel safe. Many seem small: petty frustrations or minor inconveniences, like walking home at night with a key pressed inside your palm. Or not wanting to accept a drink from a stranger in case it’s been spiked. “Not enormous compared to what’s happening in Ukraine,” Kirkwood says. But, she asks, “isn’t one of the lovely, joyful things in life being in a bar, and some, like, fit guy sends you a drink? And isn’t it s*** to live in a mental space where you go, ‘I’m not going to drink that’. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all go, ‘What will the night bring?’” She laughs at the thought of it. It all seems absurd. But these compromises are “very, very, very specifically gendered”. And, overall, they change the texture of a woman’s life, making it less free.

It comes back to a sense of agency that victims, denied brutally once, can permanently lose. Kirkwood describes herself as “very artistically and politically allergic to the over-dramatisation of victimhood”. “I’ve had some experiences, and people I know in real life who have had experiences, [and] the way that you carry on is that you resist the conception of yourself as a victim,” she explains. “To me, and this is only my own personal politics, it’s a second act of violence to a woman in particular, in the aftermath of being attacked or harmed in any way, [if] that then subsumes her identity. So when I write about those things it’s really important to me that we watch women resist that.”

Having explored abuses of power, particularly towards women, since the start of her career, Kirkwood is – overall – hopeful that things are getting better. The conversation is moving forward. We’re more aware of one another’s experiences. “But we’re speaking two weeks after Roe v Wade, and I think that is, to me, part of the backswing that’s been happening against the progress of feminism since probably the time Trump got in.”

That sense of genuine alarm at the world was clear in her recent play, which has just finished its run at the Royal Court. First announced as That Is Not Who I Am by an unknown 38-year-old first-time playwright called Dave Davidson, it was actually a play called Rapture by a much better known 38-year-old playwright: Kirkwood. Audiences arrived only to be told they weren’t seeing the play advertised – Kirkwood, writing about the dubious deaths of two (fictional) eco-activists, had been forced to use a pseudonym for her personal safety. Some took umbrage at the pseudonym, failing to see that it was all part of the storytelling. Kirkwood describes her plan: “You meet an odd title that is clearly written by someone with a fake name. And that feels weird to you.” She loves conspiracy thrillers and cites The Pelican Brief as one of her favourite films; she wanted to “play with that paranoia, put you into a state of something being off from the minute you encounter the show”. She was also keen to make something “punk”. “I wanted the feeling of: what the f*** did I just see? What is happening? What is real? Not like a West End, famous person in a nice costume, evening.” She does a petite little clap to illustrate her point.

It showed a new kind of confidence from Kirkwood. Its sense of daring, surprisingly, came from a place of grief. Her play The Welkin was on at the National Theatre when the world went into lockdown. Its run ended abruptly, less than halfway through, and it was never filmed as had been originally planned. “That was an enormous play for me,” she says, and quotes a line from Far Away by Caryl Churchill: “You make beauty and it disappears.” She is used to that – part of theatre’s power is in its impermanence, after all – but, this time, “those things, not only did they go. They went without an audience really seeing them – which, for a playwright... that’s just such a weird thing. Like Prufrock, you measure your life in plays. I’m a slow writer – that play is three or four years of my life, and it’s just gone without a meaningful existence.” (She takes pains to caveat that it was “nothing” compared to what other colleagues went through during the pandemic, who lost their income overnight.) After she had mourned the play, she said f*** it. She wanted to make something thrilling, as propulsive as a podcast. “It came out of rage – that the truth has been so defiled by, specifically, our outgoing prime minister,” she says. There was a lot of ‘f*** it’ energy coming out of me.”

Right now, she’s not sure if she has another protest play in her. She can’t imagine any response to Roe v Wade, for example, other than “complete dismay”. “I might have a heist movie brewing,” she says with a grin. After filming Maryland, she told Squires she wanted to write something for her “where she’s in Monte Carlo, in a backless evening dress, with a martini”. Behold: Kirkwood’s ‘f*** it’ era has begun.

‘Maryland’ is on BBC Two at 10pm on 20 July