Anya Reiss, shuffling papers and fiddling with her hair onstage, doesn’t seem to match up with herself on paper. At 17, she became the youngest playwright to have her play accepted at the Royal Court Theatre, where it was staged this summer to great critical acclaim. Spur of the Moment focuses on 12-year-old Delilah whose parents are too busy screaming at each other to notice their daughter kissing the 21-year-old lodger. The play received nearly unconditional praise from some of the country’s top papers for its candid look at family life and social taboos.
As soon as Reiss starts to deliver the Corpus Christi College Drama Society lecture, all her awkwardness disappears. She’s very comfortable talking about the play, lucidly describing the experience of letting go of the script, realising the auditioning process wouldn’t be like X-Factor. She draws us her listeners with behind-the-scenes anecdotes that have everyone chuckling.
The play began on one of the Royal Court’s young writers’ programmes, and Reiss wrote it while studying for her A-levels. She thinks this helped, as she didn’t feel any pressure to ‘get it right’ or hampered by any solid conception of ‘what a playwright was’. Now the first play is over, and critics are waiting to see what the ‘new voice of a generation’ will do next; is she feeling the pressure of being a one-hit wonder?
‘I do, but I don’t and I can’t let it affect what I do’. Throughout, Reiss places emphasis on the importance of freedom to what she does; ‘there’s a big danger to overcomplicate writing too much; it is just basically knowing what people say next’. Later, when I ask if seeing her first play go through the rehearsal process informed the way she wrote her second, she says: ‘I try not to imagine it onstage so much because I think you start limiting yourself.’ In Spur of the Moment the action moves between rooms all over the house, perhaps contributing to the criticism that the play is too much like TV.
One audience member has already confronted Reiss with a jibe about television, saying ‘it’s just a story – it could’ve been a soap opera…where is the real insight?’, to which she responds with unruffled calmness, getting the audience to laugh with her: ‘I do genuinely go to the theatre for a story… I think it’s just different ways of writing…there are TV programmes, plays that really say something and try to change the world and there’re others that just observe it… I think it’s not wrong to just observe it.’
Later I give her another opportunity to respond to critics: ‘the most frustrating part of the whole process was critics putting negative things down to my age,’ she says, ‘when they said it was TV writing or it became farcical at the end or other things they decided that it was a mistake I had made from being young and inexperienced, when actually rightly or wrongly they were choices I had made.’ With characteristic self-assurance, she states: ‘I’d rather be credited with making bad choices than seem like I didn’t know what I had done.’
Reiss is currently on her gap year, although with TV programmes like Skins and Hollyoaks already under her belt and her second script currently in the hands of the Royal Court, it looks like the gap could be a long one. Though I’m not sure Reiss’ voice is the one of our generation, it is distinctive and self-assured, capable of drama, comedy and biting observation; it will be interesting to see what comes next.
