“Anxious people do well in New York”: night-walking with Lucy Prebble

By Lidija Haas

The first time she ever came to New York, says Lucy Prebble, “I exhaled.” She is looking around Times Square with pleasure: “Here, I feel very relaxed.” It’s not the most obvious reaction to the neon-lit chaos in front of us. We pick our way around people hustling for small change and a troupe of young men in red shirts performing a dance routine, and raise our voices to hear each other over car horns and sirens.

Yet I can see how this lurid, slightly surreal environment might resonate with Prebble. Her plays “Enron” and “A Very Expensive Poison” skewered financial and political malfeasance with a sense for the absurd worthy of Mikhail Bulgakov. Her characters – politicians, sex workers, businesspeople – jostle for resources in the hubbub of the city.

Prebble lives in London but is in New York to film the third season of “Succession”, a television drama that first aired in 2018, not-so-loosely inspired by the Murdoch dynasty. She is one of the executive producers of the series and also writes for it. She has come straight from the Marriott hotel round the corner, where they’d been shooting since 6am.

If she’s exhausted, it doesn’t show. Striding along in black jeans and a hoodie, her long, brown hair pulled back in a bun, Prebble vibrates at a high frequency. Like the characters in “Succession”, she’s alert, intense and fast-talking. Unlike them, she’s also self-aware and considerate.

Like the characters she writes in “Succession”, Prebble is alert and intense. Unlike them, she’s also self-aware and considerate

“Are you sure you’ll be OK walking around like this?” she asks, fixing her large, dark eyes on me with concern after inspecting the height of my heels. She’s in trainers. After interrogating me about my comfort levels, she removes her mask so that I can hear her better as we walk.

Filming has been slow and unpredictable, she says, with daily covid testing, last-minute schedule changes and everybody “masked up like an astronaut”. Prebble and her co-writers, including the showrunner Jesse Armstrong, are in a bubble. They’re meeting later to watch “Collektiv”, a Romanian documentary about a nightclub fire and the ensuing corruption scandal (“What, does that not sound fun to you?”). Tomorrow morning they will write two more episodes, before filming resumes in the evening.

Prebble seems energised by Manhattan, its vast grid humming with activity. “I think anxious people do well in New York, because the outside matches the inside,” she says. Amid the frenzy of the city, “my anxiety makes sense”.

Turning a corner, things quieten down. We’re in an empty street with rows and rows of dark, shuttered theatres, not far from where “Enron” had its Broadway run more than a decade ago – an instant flop, as Prebble recalls with characteristic good cheer.

Being back in an altered New York makes her sad: “It’s weird to be in a city that feels like it’s been asleep.” Downtown felt “really dead, really eerie. Obviously all the shops are closed because there’s no one down there working, so the infrastructure’s gone.”

Prebble looks at everything this way, as if she’s taking it apart to try to comprehend the underlying mechanism. It’s a nerd’s-eye-view she developed while growing up in Surrey, outside the higher-octane urban centres she often writes about.

Whether you end up “in prison...or running an empire” depends largely on the cards you were dealt when you were born

Watching Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” as a child, she was delighted by the scenes where one president wheedled another over the phone. “I remember thinking, I bet that’s how it is! That felt much more true to me than a conversation that was, like, Sorkin-esque righteous dialogue.”

She loved comedy from a young age, her formative influences including Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci. She used to prefer comedy to the theatre, she says, and still believes it is better placed to tackle the human condition, especially the less dignified aspects of it: weakness, failure, stupidity, cowardice.

Prebble started winning prizes for her plays when she was still at Sheffield University, where she studied English literature. After she graduated in 2002, she joined a young writers’ programme at the prestigious Royal Court theatre in London, but sometimes felt alienated by a style of teaching that was rooted in method acting. She wasn’t interested in listing, say, ten things a character might have in their pockets (“it’ll be what most people have in their pockets”).

Unlike many young writers, she preferred research over self-expression and was more drawn to systems than personalities: “I was always much more inspired by the top-down method, looking from above...and going, ok, what world are we creating and what happens in this world?”

She wrote a play, “The Sugar Syndrome”, set in online chatrooms, which opened to acclaim in 2003, then worked on two series of “Secret Diary of a Call Girl”, a TV drama based on the pseudonymous Belle du Jour blog about a woman’s experience as an escort in London.

Billie Piper, the lead actor, became a close friend and creative partner, and later starred in Prebble’s play “The Effect” (2012), about a couple who meet during a clinical trial. More recently the pair teamed up again to create “I Hate Suzie” (2020), a dark, inventive series about a minor celebrity (played by Piper) whose career and marriage are derailed after a phone-hack reveals her infidelity.

The collaborative nature of theatre and television work suits Prebble, but I also get the sense that she has fought hard to win creative autonomy. Unlike many people working on big American shows, she’s not locked into an exclusive contract for “Succession” but can pursue independent projects.

At the moment these include a horror film, a TV-and-video-game hybrid (Prebble loves gaming) and a couple of plays. What she decides to work on is driven by passion rather than money: “You make a call as to freedom versus security...and my choice is always towards freedom.”

By now we’ve wandered a few blocks downtown. If it weren’t so dark, we might have been able to see the triangular Flatiron building, with the towers of the financial district lurking beyond. Prebble recalls the process of developing “Enron”, her parable of corporate wrongdoing. First staged in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis, it recounts the downfall of the energy company, once a Wall Street darling, after allegations of accounting fraud.

Written in her 20s, it emerged out of a certain historical intuition – “There was something about what happened at that company that felt to me like it was happening everywhere” – bolstered by the kind of painstaking research she now gets to outsource.

The theatre company for which she devised the play encouraged her to present Enron’s chief executive, Jeffrey Skilling, as an overreaching genius, an Icarus or Faust. But the popular narrative structure of an extraordinary individual overcoming obstacles yet brought low by a tragic flaw felt disingenuous to Prebble.

It also didn’t match her impression of many of the “finance guys” she interviewed during her research: “I was shocked and disappointed at the banality of their motivations and their characters. So very, very rarely was there a great uber-objective or political vision.” Some of them – “the most interesting ones” – were driven by power. “But mostly [it was] just money.”

Laughing, she remembers the look of uncomprehending blankness that came over a consultant on the financial industry, invited into the “Succession” writers’ room, when they were asked if making $2bn more could be a sufficient motive for a character who was already a billionaire. Of course it could.

We’ve started heading back north on Sixth Avenue, where a great hulking slab of glass and limestone rises over 200 metres into the sky: in this building in 1980, before either of us were born, Rupert Murdoch established the headquarters of his News Corporation empire. Much of it still operates here, including Fox News.

“People don’t call David Lynch’s work messy...I’m just not doing it the way you think it should be done”

Prebble has never met any of the Murdochs, she says, though she heard a rumour that Elisabeth had a “Team Shiv” T-shirt – Shiv is the Elisabeth-like character in the TV show (“That’s a very Team Kendall thing to do, actually,” says Prebble). Prebble would prefer to “make those people feel uncomfortable” rather than give them something to “watch and bathe in”. Easier said than done, as any attention can feel like flattery, “particularly for narcissists”.

She has clearly found her ideal colleagues on “Succession”, who share her dislike of hero’s-journey individualism. Though many enjoy the show for the “King Lear” tenor of the Roy family’s internecine conflicts, its genius is in using the mechanics of business procedure – a lawsuit, a company takeover – to drive the emotional drama, rather than the reverse.

The characters, often ludicrous, sinister or both, are never presented as anything special. Logan Roy, the patriarch, has a form of brilliance, “a kind of ruthlessness that’s unusual and difficult to compete with”. Mostly though, they are “quite stupid and weak” and “supported by a system that just rewards wealth”.

In “Succession”, characters don’t propel events, the system does. There is, Prebble notes, “an emotional and political position” baked into that view. She believes that how you get on in life, whether you end up “in prison...or running an empire”, depends largely on the cards you were dealt when you were born.

It is getting late and bars are turning up the music, encouraging a party mood among drinkers forced onto the pavement by covid regulations. One guy dances nimbly across our path. “I think the men are better here,” Prebble says to me, one Londoner to another. I mention that I’ve just been through a divorce and she congratulates me. “It’s a fucking brave thing to do...I had a bit of that myself, and it’s really hard but also, you never do it unless you really, really need to do it.”

She doesn’t say whether this refers to her sometime partner, Anthony Neilson, a director whose revival of “The Effect” was postponed because of the pandemic, and who worked with her and Piper on “I Hate Suzie”. Instead, we talk about the characters and plays that inspired that show: Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Nora in “A Doll’s House”.

“You shouldn’t be with a man unless there’s a really, really good reason”

The trope of “a woman who leaves, without a good enough reason” still inspires “cultural horror”, says Prebble. “At its basis is this idea of ‘what will you do if you’re on your own?’ ...that you need to be with a man.” Actually, she suspects, the opposite might be true: “you shouldn’t be with a man unless there’s a really, really good reason.”

What’s clever about “I Hate Suzie” is how it connects familiar themes of fame and social disgrace to the more private ways in which women are encouraged to define themselves. Often we conform to what we expect others want from us, without first considering how we actually feel or would prefer to live.

This is the most personal thing Prebble has made: a visceral reckoning with shame, anxiety and responsibility. Suzie has to learn how to navigate the boundary between herself and others. “It’s the first time that I’ve really started from the inside, and I found that quite scary, I still find it a bit scary, ’cause I think that show is a lot of blood on the page.”

On a corner of Ninth Avenue, Prebble starts worrying about how I’m going to get home. Then she readjusts her mask so she can stand and look me squarely in the eye. “I honestly feel like I’ve only just realised a lot about who I am in my late-mid-30s, and now I’m 40, and it’s terrifying to me that most people make almost all their major life decisions, and have to, before now.”

She was touched to hear from women who appreciated the emotional honesty of “I Hate Suzie”, as opposed to the performative kind that’s mainly just sexual frankness. And she was irritated by press coverage that branded the show and its protagonist messy. “You know, people don’t call David Lynch’s work messy.”

I’m struck by the change in her tone. Prebble gets animated about narrative structure, ideas and the film directors she admires, but until now there was none of this urgency in discussing the reception of her own work. This is different: she’s telling me not just something that’s important to her, but something she thinks I need to hear.

“When you do something that is not narratively safe and comforting and hits the beats, whether that’s in life, the choices that you make or the writing that you do, I think people’s first response is to go, ‘Oh God, you’re a bit of a mess, aren’t you!’” Maybe, she muses, “I’m just not doing it the way that you think it should be done…” ■

Lidija Haas is a freelance journalist based in New York

ILLUSTRATIONS: LUIS GRAÑENA