Grief, says playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, is an endurance test. “It feels impossible sometimes, but when you come through certain chunks of it, you feel really proud that you’re still standing.”
Her new play, When the Long Trick’s Over, investigates various forms of endurance, and follows a swimmer from one side of the Channel to the other. Using the dual lens of grief and sport, she wanted to write her way towards understanding “what a human body is capable of”.
By setting the show almost entirely in water – occasional flashbacks take place on land – Lloyd Malcolm handed her team an impossible task. “You could get a massive water tank and try to tour that round the UK,” she says doubtfully, “but that’s not going to work. So how do you create the sense that you’re swimming?” The HighTide production, directed by Chinonyerem Odimba and starring Stacey Ghent and Shenagh Govan, is currently in rehearsal. They are experimenting with aerial work and digital projection to create an illusion of the depth and breadth of the water between Dover and Calais.
Lloyd Malcolm has long been fascinated by Channel swimming. Several times, she has been tempted to try it herself. When she wrote the play, named after a line from John Masefield’s poem Sea Fever, she was in the midst of loss. “My dad had died the year before,” she explains over Zoom. “I was doing a lot of open-water swimming, and it was really helping.” Both she and her dad loved outdoor swimming, and at the time she was writing the play, she was considering doing a Channel swim in his memory.
“There’s something about returning to water,” Lloyd Malcolm says slowly, trying to pin down why it’s such a comfort. “It’s womb-like, the sounds of it, the feeling of being held.” But cold-water swimming has something particular to it, something sharp. “You get in and it feels” she sucks in her breath, “really intense and hard. Then it feels really good, and it gives you a rush. Being outside and being under the sky.” She shakes her head: “It just really helps.”
Lloyd Malcolm is best known for her speculative history play Emilia, which reimagines the life of 17th-century poet Emilia Bassano. Starting out at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Olivier award-winning show rocketed to the West End of London, winning rave reviews and avid fans. “There’s a pre-Emilia and a post-Emilia in the way my career has gone,” she says, clearly still a little bowled over by the response to the show. “I wasn’t struggling before, but things weren’t really getting anywhere.” When the Long Trick’s Over was one of those plays long stuck in development. “I was pregnant with my youngest,” she says, figuring out how long ago she wrote it. “She’s about to turn seven.” She has made tweaks to the text, but its core is still embedded in that immediate grief she felt eight years ago. While her proximity to the pain has shifted, it is still there. “I don’t think you ever really let go of grief,” she says. “It hits you again and again.”
Another form of long-term pain is brought into the story with the swimmer’s sister, who suffers from periods that hurt to the point of being unbearable. It’s something Lloyd Malcolm’s own sister deals with. “We’ve not been able to work out what it is,” she says, “and it’s devastating. We’re still so behind on how women’s health is treated. There’s this idea that periods are just something we should suffer through, when it can be hugely debilitating.” And so the show became a story of two sisters, one of them struggling to hold on through the pain, one of them struggling to hold on to the other.
Lloyd Malcolm is quick to stress that the show is fun, too. For research, she talked to many Channel swimmers, and learned that they often make obscure lists in their heads as they swim; since the 21-mile feat can take between 12 and 24 hours, they need mind games to break up the monotony. In the show, her swimmer starts by listing her favourite 90s songs, which subsequently make up the show’s playlist.
It might be eight years late, but Lloyd Malcolm believes that this is the right time for the play to be staged. “It’s dealing with all the stuff we’ve been dealing with in the last couple of years,” she says. “We’ve been enduring something for so long, we’re all exhausted. Hopefully it’s a bit of a hug of a play.”
Perhaps it’s time to finally take on the Channel, too. “Every so often I think I’ll do it one day.” Later this week, she’s talking to a group at Brockwell Lido in south London who are planning on swimming from Jersey to France. “I’m going to try to do that this summer. So, she says, slightly nervously. “I’m edging my way towards it.”
• When the Long Trick’s Over is at the New Wolsey theatre, Ipswich, 11-15 February and livestreamed on 14-15 February. Then touring.
