Like the bond between the couple at its heart, Abi Morgan’s Lovesong has endured over the years. “Weirdly, the older I get, the more I see in it,” she says of the play, which opens shortly at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
“It is one of those things that keeps giving with plays: they come back to haunt you in a really lovely way,” says the Emmy and Bafta winner, who wrote Lovesong when she was in her early 40s, almost 15 years ago.
“Perhaps because I am down the ageing process a little bit more – I am now in my mid-50s – and I’m in a long relationship, I understand the context of how you run a long journey with someone.”
First performed in 2011, the play centres on Billy and Maggie, who have been married for more than 40 years when her health begins to deteriorate. This elicits memories of their younger selves, who we see moving through the same suburban house and garden in an earlier timeline.
Produced many times around the world since, Lovesong offers a tender portrait of what it means for love to survive the passage of time. It is lightly metaphysical in the sense that time is presented as fluid – Billy imagines life “wired like a filmstrip” – and we see the older versions of the characters interact with their younger counterparts.
“It is a play that has that kind of fluidity, but it’s also about a long marriage, and I guess I have reflected on that and all of the things that it brings up, which are to do with illness and mortality, and the domestic ebb and flow of your day and the way that starts to form your relationship and become the backbone of your relationship,” Morgan says.
“That is absolutely the core of Lovesong, so it is a play that I feel more and more warm towards as the years go on.”
Although one of its themes is assisted dying, the rising political profile of this issue in many countries, including Ireland and Britain, isn’t the key reason for its lasting relevance and appeal, Morgan believes.
“I think most theatre companies around the world are looking for small plays that have big ideas within them, and then, I guess, at the heart of it, it’s a love story, and love stories are always compelling,” she says.
While there are some sadnesses in the couple’s marriage – the play also touches on childlessness and the temptation to be unfaithful – it is not about late-life regret.
“There are key moments between the younger William and Margaret where you see they are really wrestling with what they expected their life to be and what it is actually going to be,” Morgan says.
In one scene they share a “very painful moment” as they overhear a child’s birthday party on their street.
“There’s a sense of regret in that moment. But once they carry through life, the older Billy and Maggie feel a huge sense of pride, relief and nourishment in the fact that they have managed to survive and stay together,” Morgan says.
“I don’t think it’s a play that deals with regret. I think it’s a play that acknowledges that life is painful and complicated and you don’t always get what you want, but perhaps you get what you need.”
Originally built in the workshops of the innovative London-based company Frantic Assembly, Lovesong was always designed as a piece that would have “a very strong sense of movement” in its staging, so there is logic to the fact that in Dublin it will be directed by David Bolger, artistic director of CoisCéim Dance Theatre.
“It was great to find a director who has such a strong background in choreography,” Morgan says. “I also think it is quite lyrical, and there’s something in it that will really benefit from having Irish actors playing those roles.”
The cast is Nick Dunning and Ingrid Craigie, both of whom have worked on Morgan projects before, as the older Billy and Maggie, with Naoise Dunbar and Zara Devlin as the younger version of the couple, identified in the script as William and Margaret.
The Welsh writer, who lives in London, wouldn’t usually come to see one of her plays after its first run, she says, but Morgan is so “intrigued” by the Gate’s production that she hasn’t been able to resist it this time.
“I feel a little bit like an interloper coming over to have a look. I’m a tourist on it,” she says.
Morgan was born in Cardiff in 1968 to an actor mother, Pat England, and director father, the late Gareth Morgan. (They divorced when she was 13.) She went to seven schools during a peripatetic childhood as her mother chased theatre work, then studied English and drama at Exeter University before pursuing a career as a writer.
Best known as a versatile and prolific screenwriter, Morgan has a CV that is neither shy of hits nor lacking in critical acclaim. Her film credits include The Iron Lady, Suffragette and Shame (which she wrote with its director, Steve McQueen); on television, she earned a Bafta for the grim but essential Channel 4 one-off Sex Traffic, in 2005, and – to her surprise – an Emmy for The Hour, the BBC’s 1950s-set TV news drama, in 2013.
More recently she created and wrote The Split, a lively BBC drama series (available on RTÉ Player) about a family of divorce lawyers and the clients they represent, and is now executive-producing The Split Up. This spin-off about a British-Asian family law firm, written by the “tremendous” Irish-Indian screenwriter Ursula Rani Sarma, will go into production later in 2025.
Morgan has also just delivered the script for a spy feature with her most regular collaborator, the producer Jane Featherstone, of Sister Pictures, and is developing a new show for Netflix after her stunning series Eric debuted on the platform last May; like Eric, it will explore “a really dark world”.
Then, in the new year, she hopes to work on an adaptation – likely for television – of her extraordinary book This Is Not a Pity Memoir, an honest and gripping account, from 2022, of the collapse of her partner (now husband), the actor Jacob Krichefski, with a brain inflammation called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.
Krichefski, whose condition was caused by the drug he had been taking for his multiple sclerosis, was in a coma for six months. When he emerged he was suffering from a delusional misidentification disorder called Capgras syndrome. He was convinced that she was an impostor, not the real Abi Morgan. The real Abi had gone away somewhere.
In the middle of this heartbreak and distress – relayed in the book with droll skill – she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
How is Jacob now, and how is she now?
“I’m great. I feel incredibly grateful to be here and standing and alive, and it’s actually been nearly seven years since Jacob collapsed, but he’s fantastic, you know, much improved,” she says.
“The book was really a beautiful way to share the experience with the world. People have responded so warmly. It has been an incredible way to connect with other people who have experienced the kind of rare form of encephalitis that Jacob had, but also any kind of acquired brain injury or traumatic brain injury.”
Morgan feels that she’s “on the other side of it now”, and says that they’re both thankful to be able to move on with their lives, with their two children, Jesse and Mabel, “now cooked and off and out in the world”.
The time feels right to return to the crisis. Even as it was all unfolding, as she writes in the memoir, she couldn’t help experiencing “every new punch and blow with a kind of masochistic fascination”, knowing that for a writer “everything is material”.
When catastrophe hit she was working on the second series of The Split; she felt “very lucky” to have a show up and running throughout her own illness and treatment. The show’s third series went on to focus on mortality and grief.
“That definitely came out of my experience, but it was also testament to the amount of love and support I got, not just from the creative team but also from the audience who kept following it, and then also, on a personal level, from my own family and friends,” she says.
Morgan also feels lucky to be getting paid for writing in 2025, given the “really difficult time” the screen industry is going through amid a pullback from the global surge in production spending.
“It’ll be okay,” she says. “It’ll come back in some form, but it’s definitely having a bit of a reconfiguration and a reassessment right now, and commissioners on both networks and streamers are nervous about what they commission and how they sell work.”
Among the projects she hopes will go ahead soon is a film of Jennifer Egan’s novel Manhattan Beach, which revolves around a female diver and a gangster in 1940s New York. Her adaptation marks an extension of her fascination with the city, which also permeates the enthralling 1980s-set Eric, in which Benedict Cumberbatch stars as a television puppeteer whose son goes missing.
[ Manhattan Beach review: A luminous New York storyOpens in new window ]
The six-parter – about “the darker parts of ourselves, but also how that is reflected in the city” – was influenced by a spell she spent in New York in the mid-1980s, when a stint looking after a child made her think about how easy it would be to get lost there.
It is exceptionally evocative, with Morgan and the production team using the “incredible footage” available from television, music videos and stills photography to bring the period back to life.
“Putting a show like that on a global streamer was interesting, because it just really travelled in a way that it wouldn’t have done if it had been on the BBC, for example,” she says.
“Working in the vernacular of America and New York”, as she had also done with McQueen on Shame, from 2011, was a “really intriguing” opportunity, though she adds that it is always “sort of part of the job” as a writer to be the outsider who stands back and observes.
Morgan recently started writing a new play – her most recent one opened in 2017 – and is “finding it hard”, she says. “I don’t know whether that’s just because with screenwriting you have to sell your idea so much more before you even get the commission. You have to have a very realised idea to get something greenlit.”
But it felt important to return to writing for the stage.
“Theatre was the place where I found my voice and I really found my authorship, and that is something that I’ve carried through to today. I think part of going back to that now is to reinvigorate my voice again, because with screenwriting you are part of a huge collective of everybody from script editors through to producers through to commissioners.
“And the thing I love about it is that it is collaborative, but the thing that is sometimes hard about it is holding on to your voice within it.”
In the meantime, Morgan hopes that her voice, as expressed through Lovesong, will find an appreciative audience at the Gate.
Although Billy is “raging at the loss of Maggie”, the play is not consumed by mortality. It is about the intimacy and security of our closest relationships and the imprints we leave on one another – a reassuring theme in mixed-up times.
“You know, they found each other, so I hope it’s an uplifting play, ultimately,” she says. “One of the gifts you have with life is that you have to squeeze out every inch of it.”
Lovesong opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on Wednesday, May 14th, with previews from Friday, May 9th; it runs until Sunday, June 15th
