Interview: Anna Morris

Anna Morris is coming up for air. Departing from her usual comedic characters, she lands at Summerhall with her debut play Son of a Bitch. The story centres on Marnie who, on a delayed flight, in a moment of air-rage, insults her son with a four letter word. What a mile high cunt!

Yet, judging a mother isn't so simple. And Son of a Bitch explores social pressures, choice and regret, and what happens when a momentary lapse becomes a defining moment. 

"I felt like I'd done the shows I wanted to do," says Morris, about moving from comedy to drama. "I needed another challenge. I needed my brain to do something different. I needed to learn something different."

Writing a play is different for a comedian, throwing down a daunting challenge. "How do I know if this is any good?" Morris candidly asks, reflecting on the play's earliest drafts. Comedians hone their new ideas on-stage, gaining immediate audience feedback. "If no one laughs it didn't work. When I used to do my comedy work-in-progress shows, I was ruthless; I scrapped chunks: Oh that doesn't work; that's going in the bin."

In theatre, there are a few 'scratch nights' to test out new material, but there's no equivalent signal of laughs or no-laughs to guide re-writes. "Quite a few friends were there on that first night," she says. But that only created a new problem: "If I ask them, are they going to say it's good because they're my friends?"

In the end, she adapted by sending a QR code with an anonymous Google form to the audience. "And that's been so helpful," she says, "because people have been honest."

Creating theatre does have some advantages over comedy though. You're not as alone in the creative process. With the exception of her comedy director, and current dramaturg Dave Jackson, "I've always done everything myself," she says. "That's a hard thing: letting go and going, can other people help me?"

The answer to that is yes, with Morris expressing gratitude to Son of a Bitch's creative team, including director Madelaine Moore, and producers The Thelmas and Josie Underwood and doesn't take her lighting and sound designers, the care and support she's received from the venue, for granted: "It's exciting seeing that world come to life that I've created in my head."

The genesis of Son of a Bitch stemmed originally from a detail in a newspaper article about the social media pile-on and shaming of a lawyer after an altercation on a plane. "The seed of the play in my head was in this little thing I read," she recalls. "One of her friends had said: that was the worst moment of her life."

Morris thought: "There is a context to those few seconds."

While Morris uses the cramped and anxious atmosphere of a plane for the story's catalyst, it's the before-and-after of Marnie's life which the play explores: what are the myriad factors that lead to a mother calling her son a cunt?

"There was a lot of stuff I wanted to explore about age and the scaremongering of society," she says. "People saying there is specific age when you need to sort this out and you need to do this." Morris mentions a scene from Netflix's political drama House of Cards, where the character Claire Underwood, running for Vice President and First Lady, hosts her opposite number as they talk over coffee. When Claire is asked if she regrets not having children, she responds with a quiet edge: 'Do you ever regret having them?'

Morris says: "I remember seeing that going, Oh, that's nice. Someone's actually raised that point."

By creating a character in Marnie, with complicated feelings about choice, regrets and motherhood, Morris hopes Son of a Bitch will elicit different reactions. "The biggest thing for me is to write something that people come out and talk about it. With the scratch nights I did, when I came out to the bar, people were talking in a way that was quite interesting. People were saying: Oh, I don't like [Marnie]: she's a bitch... Then I could hear another person going: 'No, no, she's got a lot going on.' And then someone else said: 'I feel sorry for that kid.' Then another said: 'That kid is clearly awful!' I kind of loved that. I thought, Oh, is this what I've done. If I'm going to write something, it'd be nice to write something that might divide people."