KILLING EVE
The verdict on the latest series
Two years after leaving drama school, actress Ella Road was feeling unfulfilled. She wasn’t getting the roles she wanted, and, at theatreland parties and events, she had to contend with the same, predictable conversations.
“Often if I introduced myself as an actor, I’d see this glazed expression come over people’s faces. The standard question would be ‘What have I seen you in?’” she says, with a groan. “If you’d seen me, you would have remembered, and if you haven’t, then it’s a bit embarrassing.” Fed up with being seen as a “product”, she decided she wanted to be in the creative driving seat – and so began writing her first play.
Two-and-a-half years later, that decision is paying off in spades. Dystopian drama The Phlebotomist premiered to rave reviews in Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs last year, and has now graduated to the main auditorium, the first time that space has hosted a play by a firsttime writer for several years. The Phlebotomist was also in contention for an award at last night’s Oliviers.
When I meet Road a few days before the awards ceremony, she seems bemused by the idea that she’d be nervous – “We don’t really have to do anything, do we? We just have to sit there” – but is thrilled for the
production team as a whole. For the original run, she says, “We had less than three weeks’ rehearsal to put it on, so it’s exciting that something that was quite weird and rushed has been recognised in a really big way.”
But while the 27-yearold may think The Phlebotomist “weird”,
I’d beg to differ. What’s really impressive about it, as a play about science, is its accessibility, and the fluency with which it engages both head and heart. Exploring the potential consequences of the new revolution in genomic – or gene-based – medical testing, it imagines a world in which people are rated out of 10 according to a DNA reading determining their predisposition to physical and mental ailments. That score then determines one’s attractiveness to potential employers, mortgage providers, and romantic partners alike.
So as it is, the play begins with a couple of twentysomethings, Bea and Aaron, comparing their marks – the beginning of a fateful relationship.
Though Road started writing The Phlebotomist in 2016, its premise had been percolating in her mind for a lot longer – ever since, while studying English at Oxford, her boyfriend at the time showed her a video about genetic testing for pancreatic cancer. Fascinated by the idea of being able to predict your future health, she began to wonder how such medical prognostication could be misused in a society where, thanks to social media, we are increasingly obsessed with appraising each other. “I’m ready for a backlash,” she says of our new age of “ratism”, to use her, and the play’s, own loaded expression. “I hold this hope that everyone’s going to think ‘What are we doing?’ and they’re all gonna chuck their phones in the bin.” Like all the best science fiction these days, The Phlebotomist is barely science fiction at all. In January, the NHS announced controversial plans to offer advanced genetic tests to anyone willing to pay. Really, it is just showing us the logical extreme of our current obsession with good health – or “wellness”, to use the fashionable term.
In doing so, Road asks tricky questions such as: what do we mean by mental “illness” and should we be looking to eradicate it? Road certainly questions that assumption. “My family is full of people with different types of mental health issues, some are genetic and some are not, and we are more vibrant because of it.”
Does she think it is becoming easier for female writers to get their work commissioned? Road’s name can now be mentioned in the same breath as critically acclaimed playwrights Lucy Prebble, Laura Wade, Lucy Kirkwood and Natasha Gordon. “We still have a long way to go,” she says. “I think there’s still an idea that being female and being a writer is somehow associated with riskiness. We’re spoken about as if we’re a minority group
‘I’m ready for a backlash. I hold this hope that everyone’s going to think “What are we doing?” and chuck their phones in the bin’
that needs to be represented, but we’re 52 per cent of the population.” To prove her point, the National Theatre’s new season – which was unveiled at the end of March and begins in May – will not feature one play by a woman, a fact highlighted in an open letter signed by 200 writers and published in The Stage newspaper.
Sandi Toksvig, the comedian, television presenter and co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, also made her irritation known, suggesting that the venue should remove the word “National” from its name.
In its defence, the theatre pointed out that the new season was only a very partial reflection of its plans for the rest of this year and that it has committed to having 50:50 gender representation for directors and living writers in place by 2021.
Road says she is a supporter of this sort of strategy. “[Quotas] are not supposed to be long-term solutions,” she says. “They’re more just about setting that fire under people’s bums so that they do something about it.”
Growing up in north London, Road was the arty one in a family of medics – her dad is a neuroradiologist, her stepmum is a nurse, and her mum is a GP – which may have been a blessing in disguise, given the scientific niche she’s now carving for herself.
She is currently writing plays dealing with fracking and the particularly hot potato of gender testing in sport, while she has also had a pilot greenlit by Channel 4 for a series that she describes as another “piece of science which is extrapolated through a human story”.
With the commissions racking up, it’s clear the acting career is on hold for now. Not that she’s prepared to ditch it entirely.
“If my genes are good enough, maybe I’ll live long enough to do both. Let’s hope I’m an 8.5,” she laughs.
The Phlebotomist is at the Hampstead Theatre until April 20. Details: hampsteadtheatre.com