‘Cancer forced me to take a career break’
‘The Split’ writer Abi Morgan tells Guy Kelly about the unexpected drama in her own life
Abi Morgan has never particularly enjoyed being the centre of attention. She tends to come away from interviews “feeling a bit peeled”, even when they go well. She once, briefly, flirted with the idea of being an actor, but these days can’t pass a CCTV camera without selfconsciousness creeping in.
As one of our most celebrated stage and screen writers for almost two decades, it has always been the lives of others – Fifties journalists in The Hour, a sex addict in Shame, suffragettes in, um, Suffragette or Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady – that have been of far greater interest than her own.
But for most of the last year, Morgan has had little choice but to accept her role as protagonist in a gruelling episode out of her control. In April 2019, aged 50 and beginning production on the second series of her BBC legal drama, The Split, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Morgan’s cancer was aggressive and serious but, mercifully, treatable. Over 10 months, she endured radiotherapy, chemotherapy and a mastectomy, until three weeks ago doctors finally delivered some good news: “I’m clear!”
We meet in a boardroom at a production office in London, where Morgan has arrived straight from her final radiotherapy session. “I just felt as if I’d been kicked in the side by a horse, but I’m so lucky. It feels amazing to come out the other side,” she says, her voice a mix of triumph and exhaustion.
Now 51, her hair – previously chestnut brown and collar-length
– is an ash-coloured pixie cut, but she looks great, and if illness and pharmaceutical onslaught took any wind from her sails, it has returned with gale-force interest: in person, she is every bit as sharp, engaging and honest as her scripts.
“You feel like you’re skirting a little bit too close to the rocks when you have a cancer diagnosis. It’s gruelling, to say the least. I’ve spent months on the sofa watching daytime TV and just staring into space. It’s a very lonely place to be,” she admits.
The loneliness was difficult, but so occasionally was the fuss illness breeds. Morgan “loves a good party”, but at heart she’s happiest when attaining near-invisibility. “Yes, I found that part quite excruciating, actually,” she says.
“As a writer, I’m inherently a loner, and I found it very difficult to ask for help.”
In the thick of her treatment, two authors she admired hugely, Deborah Orr and Kate Figes, lost their own more public battles with breast cancer, which made Morgan “aware of all those women who don’t survive it”.
The support was there, though: from her partner of more than 20 years, the actor Jacob Krichefski; their teenage children, Jesse and Mabel; and a host of other, unexpected well-wishers.
“It’s the continual acts of kindness that blew me away… That neighbour who leaves a lasagne on your doorstep. That actor you worked with, years ago, who didn’t ever seem to notice you but who sends you the most thoughtful email. The resilience of your children. The love of your mother again. I just felt incredible love from people,” Morgan says. “You feel fragile, but in a weird way it made me shut up for a while. My characters talk and talk, but [cancer] made me stop and self-reflect and stare at the sky. I got a career break, in a way. An essential one.”
Morgan was “lucky”, she supposes, that the project interrupted by illness was a second series. Producers and co-writers on The Split could help and keep her up-to-date with goings-on, and the returning cast, led by Nicola Walker and Stephen Mangan, already knew their characters inside out.
The six-part series continues to follow the lives of the Defoe family, who almost all work in divorce law. Fans of the first series will be delighted to know the cases are even messier and it continues to be a compelling, deliciously glossy argument for never actually getting married. She was pitched the idea for the series by a fellow mother and former family lawyer on the side of a school hockey pitch. Morgan, who has an unashamed fascination with celebrity marriages, was hooked.
“When the gods fall, we’re reassured,” she says by way of explanation. How many times have we read about some glamorous couple splitting up and a part of you goes, ‘Oh God, I can’t believe it’, but another part feels a sense of relief their lives aren’t perfect?”
Morgan never did get married – “I was never asked” – and isn’t personally very fussed by it. “I wanted to, I had moments, but then life and children
‘The acts of kindness blew me away. I just felt incredible love from people’
happen, and you realise what the things are that really bind you, so the idea of being in a big white dress seems a bit ridiculous. I’m actually really pleased to see civil partnerships come in. If they’d been around, I’d have done that. But I still believe in the energy of marriage.”
Divorce is arguably having a bit of a moment, if that’s the right term. Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is a favourite at the Oscars tomorrow, and one of last year’s most talked-about novels, Fleishman Is in Trouble, told the story of a high-flying couple’s bitter divorce.
Morgan’s parents split when she was 11; “we’re a generation that’s come from divorce,” she says of that writerly cohort. “Baumbach went through one, I come from one, and it’s fascinating. Everyone wants a ‘good divorce’, we look at Gwyneth’s blended family and it’s hugely impressive,” she says. “But we also live longer. Most people get married in their 20s, and my God, it’s a hard ask to have them last until their 90s with someone.”
People still stick together “for the children”, of course. “On an average night with an average group of girlfriends, there is probably somebody who’d say they are tolerating a marriage because they are worried about the effects on their children – but it’s only by seeing the ‘good’ divorces that we know children don’t have to be screwed up.”
Fortunately, Morgan’s is a happy household. Her “career break” over, she is now back to doing what she likes best: taking on countless projects, and sitting in coffee shops all day, immersed in pains au chocolat and lives that aren’t her own. Next, she has two literary adaptations – feature films based on Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach and Christine Mangan’s suspense thriller Tangerine – and a presumably enormo-budget Netflix series about Cleopatra.
And then? I wonder if Morgan might break the rule of a lifetime and put her own experiences in something. She winces a little.
“Not yet, but I will do, once I’ve processed it all… I don’t know yet if I have anything to add,” she says. I don’t imagine for a moment that’s true, but anyway, she says, she is more relaxed about what might come.
Illness has “made me realise how utterly irrelevant we are, really. The only people you’re relevant to are your children and the people around you… And that’s been a good thing to appreciate.”