The Enron playwright felt her career was floundering when the call came from Jesse Armstrong’s acclaimed series and changed everything. She talks about why writing is a lonely calling, and the problem with ‘grandparent-pleasing’ theatre
Lucy Prebble’s career has come full circle. We are meeting in the slightly anonymous offices of London’s National Theatre, where the writer once worked as an “assistant to an assistant” for then artistic director Nicholas Hytner: opening the post, fielding complaints, fixing dinners. Today she is an integral part of the team behind the cultural behemoth that is HBO’s Succession; a playwright of depth, creativity and playfulness; creator of the almost frighteningly mesmerising Billie Piper TV series I Hate Suzie; with a sparkling guest appearance on Have I Got News for You thrown in for good measure.
It was while working at the National, in her early 20s, that Prebble found out that her first play, The Sugar Syndrome, was to be staged at Sloane Square’s Royal Court theatre: Upstairs. Enron – her dazzlingly clever telling of the story of the energy company’s infamous rise and fall, which was staged at Chichester, the West End and then Broadway – would follow six years later. (Prebble is not one for churning out work. She obsesses about her plays. Ruminates. Redrafts. Drafts again.)
