Phoebe Eclair-Powell: ‘I hit a wall and lost all my confidence. Writing for Hollyoaks saved me’

All appeared to be going swimmingly. The following year was going to be her year. She had two plays at the Edinburgh Fringe — Torch, and Epic Love and Pop Songs – while Fury, her modern take on Medea, had been shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award and was getting its premiere at London’s Soho Theatre. The epitaphs “promising” and “rising playwright” were being thrown around.

But then it began to crumble. Neither Torch nor Epic Love quite took off during the fringe and Eclair-Powell found herself sitting in the theatre hearing the tip of seats as some audience members left. “There are few things as heartbreaking for a playwright as hearing that noise. Because you want people to like what you’ve done, you want them to enjoy it. And I’m a massive people pleaser, so it was very hard.” 

While Fury had its run extended and garnered some enthusiastic reviews, Eclair-Powell found herself fixating only on the negative ones, unable to get them out of her head. She can still quote complete sentences from the Time Out review.

“I hit a wall and lost all my confidence. I wasn’t robust enough – maybe because I was a precious, precocious little only child who wanted everyone to love me. I wrote a lot of really bad plays that have quite rightly stayed in the drawer. But my agent stood by me.” She says the lifeline was an offer to write for Hollyoaks, a TV soap she had grown up watching.

“Hollyoaks really saved me. Because if you have a writing job like that you really have to get over yourself. You have to hit the deadlines and that deadline might be in three hours. You just have to sit down and get on with it, you can’t procrastinate and second-guess yourself. It gave me confidence. I liked being in big story conferences. I loved pitching ideas and working in a writers’ room.”

Q&A

What was your first non-theatre job?

Working in a sweetshop.

What was your first professional theatre job?

An apprentice at Battersea Arts Centre. 

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?

Don’t be competitive and jealous. I wish I’d spent less time worrying about what other people were doing and more time worrying what I was doing. I now know that even those who appear to be successful will be experiencing rejections too.

What’s your best advice for auditions?

Actors are just so brilliant at making what you’ve written sound better. I always admire those actors who turn up for the audition and they have done the prep. They have read the play; they have opinions about it.

If you hadn’t been a playwright, what would you have been?

I’d have worked in theatre in some capacity. I love everything about it. I’d have been a cheerleader for it.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?

I’m a really superstitious person and when I’ve got a play on, I look for signs –magpies – and I would avoid ladders. My pre-show ritual is dry heaving in the toilets.

Were it not for Shed: Exploded View, she might have moved entirely into TV (she is one of the writers on Paramount+’s upcoming The Road Trip, based on Beth O’Leary’s novel of the same name), but in what could have been one last throw of the dice, she entered Shed: Exploded View for the Bruntwood, the UK’s biggest national competition for playwriting, and was “beyond shocked” when it won the £16,000 prize. “It gave me the external validation I needed. I thought: ‘Maybe I am good at writing plays after all.’ ”

But even then, the journey has been tricky. There was impetus behind the play and a swift workshop, but as Eclair-Powell was on a train back down from Manchester to London in March 2020, messages on her phone told her of imminent lockdown. When the theatre reopened, there were programming delays, so Eclair-Powell says that seeing it in rehearsal is now a surreal experience “because it has been such a long process and I’ve changed so much since I first began writing it, and even since it won the Bruntwood, so I hear and see echoes of a past me – although there’s some of the new me in there as well”.

Initially, the delay made her feel that she couldn’t move on until Shed: Exploded View had been produced. What has changed for Eclair-Powell is that the pandemic brought her back to theatre again. She was on commission for London’s Bush Theatre and wrote the devastating monologue Harm, which was produced by the BBC as part of its Culture in Quarantine strand and subsequently became a hit at the theatre with Kelly Gough as the lonely estate agent who becomes obsessed with a social-media influencer.

She also had a baby and suffered postnatal depression, a subject she would like to write about in the future. The NHS and returning to work helped, and she now sees that there could be a future for her both as a TV and stage writer.

“I love working in both – there are the same heartbreaks. But for one, you are massively more compensated for your time and work.” She could not pay her son’s nursery fees without the TV work. Looking back, she thinks her plays have always been obsessed with motherhood, but she didn’t realise it.

“Motherhood has always been there and it’s there in Shed too. There are bits I look back on and I think: ‘Oh that’s just like having postnatal depression.’ Everything about motherhood is violent from giving birth. It is a complete upheaval. Like everything has exploded in your life. Everything is different for me now because I’m a different person. But that’s a good thing.”

CV Phoebe Eclair-Powell 

Born: 1989, Camberwell, London
Training: Drama Centre
Landmark productions: 
• Wink, Theatre503, London (2015)
• Epic Love and Pop Songs, Underbelly, Edinburgh (2016)
• Torch, Pleasance, Edinburgh (2016)
• Fury, Soho Theatre, London (2016)
• Really Big and Really Loud, Paines Plough, touring (2021)
• Harm, Bush Theatre,  London (2021)
Agent: Independent Talent

Shed: Exploded View is at Manchester’s Royal Exchange from February 9 to March 2. Visit: royalexchange.co.uk