On her new play and marriage to David Morrissey
Esther Freud tells Elizabeth Day how a prison visit inspired her new play, and recalls her late father Lucian’s literary advice
Esther Freud went to prison five years ago. Luckily, not as an inmate but to research her new play, Stitchers, which tells the story of a group of prisoners who are rehabilitated through learning how to sew.
One of the first inmates she met was a man in a wheelchair, incarcerated on the Isle of Wight. He was doing an intricate piece of embroidery featuring two artichokes. At one point, he became very agitated, physically threatening and shouted at the volunteer that there was “a real problem”.
“I was really nervous,” says Freud, of the scene. “My heart was thumping.”
It turned out the cause of his anger was quite prosaic: “He said: ‘This cream wool is not the same shade of cream as the one I’ve been using!’”
At that moment, she says, “I knew I had a play.”
Freud is better known as an author of fiction and has written a series of critically acclaimed novels – including The Sea House, Mr Mac and Me and the semi-autobiographical Hideous Kinky, which was adapted into a 1998 film starring Kate Winslet. She is also the daughter of the late artist Lucian Freud and is married to the actor David Morrissey, with whom she has three children.
It is a seriously arty clan to be born into. Are her children – Albie, 23, Anna, 20, and 14-year-old Gene – following in the family footsteps?
“One of them really isn’t, which amazes me,” she says. “Albie’s the most sociable. His talents are being incredibly diplomatic, sociable and
‘When I was younger I was so earnest, so serious… never glamorous’
‘My father had a very, very precise ear for language – he was tyrannical about it’
quite straightforward. He’s finishing a politics degree at university. I don’t know where he came from. It’s a joy in my life. He’s just so sunshiny.
“My other two are dark and tormented,” she jokes. “No, not really. My daughter is very creative. She writes and paints and draws and plays the piano. And my youngest one is incredibly good at the guitar and just plays for seven hours a day. So it’s exciting.”
At 55, with her children growing up and an impressive career behind her, Freud is in the prime of her life. She says she was walking down the street the other day and she suddenly caught herself “feeling happy”.
“I think when I was younger I was so earnest, I was so serious. I was never… glamorous. I was there with my hair in a ponytail being like: ‘I want to do theatre and education’,” she says.
These days, she has grown into herself and is lighter in spirit. Writing Stitchers, she adds, has been “wonderful” and “collaborative” in a way that the solitary act of writing novels is not.
The play, which is about to premiere at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London, follows a group of prisoners over the course of a year as they are taught needlework by the late social reformer Lady Anne Tree. She founded the charity Fine Cell Work in 1997, with the aim of enabling prisoners to earn a decent wage by selling their handiwork, ultimately aiding their reintegration into society.
Sewing and prison might seem like a paradoxical pairing, but Freud has seen first-hand the extraordinary effects that needlework can have on hardened criminals. She says Fine Cell Work enables inmates to gain focus and self-respect: the money they make from their sales can be used for phonecards, food or to send back to their families.
The more time Freud spent in sewing groups, the more she noticed “the men [and it is mostly men: less than five per cent of the UK’S prison population is female] sort of softened. They were able to concentrate, they became much more engaged in conversation,” she says.
At Wandsworth Prison, she asked one man what the sewing group meant to him. “And he said, ‘It’s the only place where anyone calls me by my name.’ Another man said: ‘It’s the colours. Everything here is grey, and when I go back to my cell, I put all the thread around my room, so my room has colour in it.’”
Although Freud has been widely praised for her fiction, the only thing she excelled at when she went to a progressive Steiner school as a young girl was “sewing, stitching, weaving, knitting, crocheting… I didn’t learn to read until I was 11. I was really quite stupid,” she says.
She came from a family that valued creativity. She is the greatgranddaughter of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Her uncle was the broadcaster and politician Sir Clement, and her sister is the fashion designer Bella. Was there ever any competitiveness between the two highly accomplished siblings?
“No, not really. Bella was the visual one of us and is a genius for design. I’ve always been the slightly more crafty one, so I was always making cushions. Whereas she’s much more the kind of creator who draws things,” says Freud.
Her “many” half-sisters include the novelist Susie Boyt. Freud’s mother, the writer and gardener Bernadine Coverley, took her two young daughters travelling in Seventies Morocco before settling in Royal Tunbridge Wells.
In this bohemian environment, Freud says:
“My father was making his pictures and my mother was always gardening and making us clothes. We never just sat and watched TV. We never didn’t do things. And that I really am grateful for.”
Although her father was not a consistent presence when Freud was growing up, she later modelled for him and they became close. She bears no rancour towards him for his womanising (by some accounts, he is believed to have fathered up to 40 children). He died seven years ago and she still misses him “so much”.
“I miss the feeling of being in his gang… My father was [always telling] lots of stories, it was lots of intrigue and jokes and stories and a lot of twinkling amusement.”
When Freud started writing novels in her 20s after a brief stint as an actress (she had parts in The Bill and Doctor Who), her father was one of her first readers. “He had a very, very precise ear for language. He was quite tyrannical about it… He read my novels very closely and gave me a few very, very good notes,” she recalls. “I remember once I’d written, ‘She was still as a donkey,’ and he said: ‘Are donkeys particularly still?’ Or he had some notes about one of my books that had quite a lot of sex in it, unusually because it’s so hard to write about. And he said, ‘I don’t think you really need it.’ So I took most of it out… and I think he was right.”
Now that her father is no longer around, I wonder if she asked her husband to read early drafts of her play and give comments? The two of them met at drama school and live in north London.
“It’s odd, but he wasn’t very helpful,” she says with an affectionate laugh. “At one point, I had a butler and David played the butler, which was quite a small part.”
But in the end, the butler fell by the wayside in one of the edits: “So now he’s out of a job, poor guy, I feel very guilty,” she laughs.
To be fair, Morrissey, who has starred in dramas The Missing and
The Walking Dead, has just finished a highly successful run as Mark Antony in Nicholas Hytner’s production of Julius Caesar at the Bridge Theatre, so is not exactly scrabbling around for parts.
As it turned out, Freud had a delightful time casting her own play, because “it was me, my director, and my co-producer – three women. And we sat in a room, as maybe 30 men came in over the course of a few days. There were basically all these men just streaming in one after the other.”
That sounds like an exact inversion of the traditional castingcouch power dynamic, I say.
“Yes!” Freud says, with a dreamy expression. “It was rather marvellous.”
Stitchers by Esther Freud opens at the Jermyn Street Theatre tomorrow and runs until Saturday June 23. Details: 020 7287 2875, jermynstreettheatre.co.uk